Bestseller adapted into a vibrant, edifying film
“You can’t be walking around at night, on a white street, and not expect trouble.” Author Isabel Wilkerson’s mother has likely said something like this before, in one of any number of tragic contexts. In this case, George Zimmerman has recently killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin for walking in a hoodie at night while Black. And Wilkerson wonders: Is it really on the young man’s shoulders to avoid arousing suspicion, then deadly overreaction, among his fellow American citizens?
Martin’s name is one of many heard in the supple new film “Origin,” and screenwriter-director Ava DuVernay has found a way to turn an adaptation-defying bestseller — Wilkerson’s magnificent “Caste” — into what feels like the only possible film version.
Without sacrificing any of Wilkerson’s
personal story, “Origin” honors what the author and journalist did in taking on a hugely ambitious research project. Subtitled “The Origins of Our Discontents,” “Caste” came out in 2020. It wasn’t easy to write, but it’s a provocative and elegantly intertwined examination of America’s racial history and structural biases, and their links to India’s caste system and Nazi Germany’s murder of 6 million Jews.
The result on screen is not like any other how-I-wrotethis biopic, partly because it’s much more than that. DuVernay dramatizes the historical figures in Wilkerson’s book through her travels abroad and her family joys and sorrows at home, in constantly surprising ways.
It begins where too many American stories begin: with one more dead Black body on a residential street. The 2012 slaying of Martin serves as the sobering prologue to “Origin.”
The news story strikes Wilkerson (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) as worth writing about, though she resists the entreaties of a friend and former New York Times editor (Blair Underwood).
Soon enough, grief sends Wilkerson into a heartbreaking new realm of purpose. Wilkerson’s second husband (Jon Bernthal) dies unexpectedly. Wilkerson soon suffers another loss and must pick up the pieces.
With the death of her mother (Emily Yancy) in due course, Wilkerson focuses on work while seeking solace in friends,
friends/interview subjects and colleagues, some more supportive of her central thesis than others.
“Origin” struggles to accommodate DuVernay’s dramatized research, in flashbacks focused on 1930s Germany and the Dalit caste — the lowest, the ones tasked with cleaning latrine waste with their bare hands. But like the book, the film about the making of the book pulls off a near-miracle in shaping a multiplying amount of information and ideas that are not simply information and ideas.
To say “Origin” is destined for countless classroom screenings
risks making it sound earnestly educational. It is, I suppose, educational; it’s also vibrant and adroit and searching as human drama.
Like the book that inspired it, DuVernay’s adaptation makes us see what Wilkerson saw, all around the world we make for ourselves. And then remake. Or else.
MPA rating: PG-13 (for thematic material involving racism, violence, some disturbing images, language and smoking)
Running time: 2:21
How to watch: In limited theaters