Racism, a caste of thousands
There’s an unavoidable conundrum at the heart of Ava DuVernay’s ambitious film: how to adapt a complex work of intellectual non-fiction into a compelling narrative feature.
DuVernay (Selma), who wrote as well as directs, takes the unusual approach of charting the story of how Isabel Wilkerson wrote her 2020 bestseller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents – dramatising the ideas of her thesis but concurrently making it the Pulitzer Prizewinning New York Times journalist’s own personal journey.
While it cannot avoid feeling at times didactic and cluttered, DuVernay makes it a compelling story, a drama that she deliberately pitches at a wide movie-going audience.
Though she is speaking to relevant, emotionally charged socio-political ideas, she cleverly grounds them in likeable characters simply living their lives.
Ke y to her success is the commanding Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (Ki ng
Richard) as Wilkerson, a journalist on a break after writing her first book, whose editor (Blair Underwood) tries to entice her to write about the 2012 Florida killing of Trayvon Martin – sending her the real 911 audio of the entitled, cold-blooded killer as he stalked the 17-ye arold.
The recording – which is played while re-enacting the events – sparks Wilkerson’s suspicion that racism alone cannot explain this vast inequality, which occurs in societies around the world.
She believes it to be a question of constructed social hierarchies, or caste.
The rest of the film tracks her research attempting to connect centuries of injustices, much of which is dramatised while splicing the absorbing thesis with Wilkerson’s own personal upheaval – namely the sudden deaths of her loving husband Brett (Jon Bernthal) and mother (Emily Yancy).
It’s hard to believe the dense narrative, which shifts between Nazi Germany, Mississippi in the 1940s, and contemporary India, was filmed on location across three countries in just 37 days.
It’s moving, thoughtprovoking and, despite its flaws, commendable for hitching complicated academic ideas onto a warm, accessible wagon.