Personal Note: I have been to Selma, Alabama exactly once for a—strangely enough—scholar’s bowl tournament and it’s a place that is nearly as “unchanged by time” as Cuba. Maybe it was just the part I saw, but most of the buildings looked like they hadn’t changed much since MLK visited, and one guy in the tournament said “I feel like I’m in an old ‘In the Heat of the Night’ episode.” To be honest, the locations that the movie “Selma” (which was filmed somewhere near Atlanta) uses to recreate 1965 are in some ways more modern. Anyway, on to the movie…
What Works: From the very first moment, we’re seeing Martin Luther King Jr. as a man who has to think about the perception of everything that he does or says. [Will the tie he’s picked to wear while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize make him look too fancy?] And the movie gets that MLK wasn’t just the dominate figure of the Civil Rights movement, but the first hero of the Public Relations age. He came along at the exact moment that television and public perception could make or break a cause (or candidate) and he wanted to use that to show Americans images of nasty racial violence and stark oppression that they could no longer ignore …or turn the channel from.
He wants to go to Selma to orchestrate protests that he hopes will turn into disgusting blood baths so the cameras can finally pick up on what happens when the national lights aren’t on. And he’s not the only one using perception, as evidenced in a terrific early scene where Oprah’s character tries to register to vote but is asked to jump through increasingly high hoops (“how many county judges are there? 67…Okay, name them all”). Black people in Selma can technically vote even as the movie shows just how difficult it really is since the devil is in the details. One example: someone who can already vote has to vouch for them, but how can they when nobody they know can vote? All of this is to show how rights can be suppressed on legal technicalities, and it’s a quietly powerful showcase for how the mundane details of a complex law is where oppression can hide comfortably. [People have drawn parallels between this film and recent police shootings and that’s true, but I was also reminded of Voter I.D. laws and how Southern states worked to undermine the Voting Rights Act the second the Supreme Court recently overturned portions of it.]
The movie’s trailers highlight scenes of protests, but I’d say roughly 80 to 90 percent of this film is made up of interior scenes between characters talking and (most interestingly) strategizing. The movie excels at showing how all the people involved are not just doing what they want to do but what they think their base wants them to do. Even King’s chief foe, Alabama Governor George Wallace, is a savvy media manipulator cynically playing to his voters and it’s difficult to tell where his true ideology ends and wanting to get elected begins. Everything is a chess match played out in the expectations of the public (the way Civil Rights had to be won in the minds of people first), and King is a man taking heat from all sides: Wallace thinks he’s a dangerous agitator, LBJ (in the film) wishes he’s heed caution, and even other people in the Civil Rights movement (like SNCC, portrayed as something of a rival organization or Malcolm X) resent the attention he’s gotten.
What Doesn’t: The film’s portrayal of LBJ is flat-out wrong. I know director Ava DuVernay (who made the under-seen gem “Middle of Nowhere”) feels like that’s not the case, and points to some newspaper articles claiming LBJ wanted MLK to be cautious in Selma. But there’s no denying that LBJ passed more pro-minority legislation than any president in history not named Abraham Lincoln, and he and King had a much better relationship than the one portrayed in this movie. [“Fun” fact: in certain parts of the Southeast, LBJ is actually more hated than MLK and seen as a “race traitor” who sold out the Dixiecrats and there’s no denying his Civil Rights legislation flipped the Southeast’s white voters from solidly Democratic to largely Republican.]
But even aside from political history, the LBJ in this movie is completely off. He’s miscast, he doesn’t speak like LBJ, he doesn’t command the presence of LBJ, he’s not as savvy or sly or humorous as LBJ, he doesn’t display the in-the-bloodstream political instincts of the last Democratic president who had absolute legislative muscle, etc. LBJ had the ideals of FDR and the swaggering machismo of General Patton, but this film portrays him as the most timid, wonky bureaucrat in the Department of Libraries. Everything about it feels wrong, and I think that’s what people are really getting at when they criticize the film’s depiction. Not for nothing, but this is a film with no less than four historic American icons (MLK, Coretta Scott King, Wallace, and LBJ) and every one of them is portrayed by a British thespian. And accept for the excellent David Oyelowo, I would argue that the rest are miscast since they really don’t look, sound, or have the presence of the people they’re portraying.
I know that sounds like petty nit-picking, but DuVernay herself is a Los Angeles native who doesn’t quite get under the skin of what the Southeast was (or is) really like. I think a lot of the people fixating on LBJ is because “Selma” is (in parts) hampered by an outsider’s reluctance to really dive deep into the material, and I think it’s a lot more of a conventional and even safe film than it really believes it is. [The fact that the biggest controversy around it is LBJ’s portrayal—and nothing really to do with MLK or anything in Selma or what’s depicted beyond dialogue—shows how unintentionally risk-averse this movie really is.]
I think of it the same way I think of “Lincoln,” another dialogue-driven film about the passage of a historic law that was largely built on intimate two-people scenes or grand speeches: it’s a film that I really liked watching the one time but probably wouldn’t watch a second time. It’s smart, intellectually interesting, and occasionally riveting, but it’s also stagey (it would probably be an excellent play) and maybe a little too earnest for its own good. It feels like the nobleness of the characters and the weight of the material has boiled some of the flavor and personality out of the movie. Very, very few of the characters are anything more than embodiments of different ideologies: they speak about what they believe but almost none have been given a second layer or personality trait. Even a casual conversation between Martin and Coretta or Martin and young organizer John Lewis can turn into a collegiate-level soliloquy on the nature of man and I felt my attention start drifting during some of the last third’s speeches.
What I Would Have Done Differently: In 1992, Spike Lee made one of the best biographies I’ve ever seen with “Malcolm X.” It got so far under the skin of Malcolm X that I felt like I really, truly knew him. I would argue that even though MLK has been portrayed by everyone from Jeffrey Wright to Don Cheadle, the definitive MLK film hasn’t yet been made. I think if Michael B. Jordan gained weight to play him, he’d be exactly right for a biography that finally tackles King’s full, fascinating life. [I’m not big on this whole “take a specific event out of a famous person’s life” cliff-notes approach that seems to be popular since “Lincoln.”]
In total, I would say that this is a solid film, but not a spellbinding one. Grade: B+ [Please for the love of God, read the ENTIRE review, and don’t just skim down to the grade. I know it’s a lengthy piece, but a big part of the reason I don’t usually give grades during the initial review is because I don’t want people to just look at that.]