Peter Howell
‘Selma’ captures important slice of U.S. history,
The Martin Luther King Jr. we see in Ava DuVernay’s Selma isn’t the legendary figure of commemorative holidays, stamps or statues.
He’s a man of flesh, blood and foibles, striving to do what he believes is right while shrewdly calculating the practical and political moves necessary to achieve his aims in the racially divided America of 1965.
Nor is this truth-based drama, which deserves major attention this awards season, a routine biopic of King, the Baptist minister, civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner felled by an assassin in 1968.
It’s not a biopic at all, actually, since it focuses on just a few momentous months in the winter and spring of 1965, when King’s message of non-violent opposition to hatred was seriously put to the test in a southern enclave where racism ruled and lynchings were still common.
Writer/director DuVernay was unable to secure the film rights to King’s most famous speeches — including his “I Have a Dream” oration at the 1963 March on Washington, D.C. — so she and main scripter Paul Webb were obliged to create dialogue that captures the man’s essence, rather than his exact words.
This benefits the work rather than limits it. We see history as it unfolds, not as it has been encased in amber, in a movie that needs to be seen in these anxious days of renewed racial and cultural unrest.
Nothing could stop this film, just as nothing could stop King, who is masterfully rendered by David Oyelowo. The British actor, who previously starred in DuVernay’s 2012 Sundance-honoured family drama Middle of Nowhere, utterly nails King’s measured voice, cadence and gestures.
Oyelowo depicts the civil rights fighter as a man aiming for the law books rather than the history texts. He’s not always sure about what steps he should take, and with very good reason.
This truth-based drama, which captures both MLK’s faults and strengths, deserves major attention this awards season
The 87 kilometres of highway linking Selma, Ala., with the state capitol of Montgomery, today a U.S. National Historic Trail, was in 1965 a path of hostility, obstruction and violence for any black person who challenged white authority.
It’s the path King and his followers vowed to traverse that spring, in a five-day March to peacefully demonstrate for the right of African-Americans to vote, a right supposedly guaranteed by law but one trampled by racist police and civic officials.
DuVernay depicts the three marches — there were two early attempts — in all their significant drama, including the infamous “Bloody Sunday” police attack against 500 protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7,1965, savagery that was televised globally to a shocked world.
DuVernay has been criticized for downplaying the support of then-U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson for the Selma marchers. Played by Tom Wilkinson, who gets LBJ’s shrewd mind and rough manner exactly right, Johnson is seen urging King to get on board with his government’s War on Poverty agenda and to leave voting rights until later.
Is this fair to the legacy of Johnson, who was instrumental in enacting civil rights and voting legislation? In my opinion, the film correctly depicts LBJ as a calculating politician, forever weighing pros and cons, as all pols do.
He wouldn’t have been the first president to say one thing in private and another in public.
And Selma isn’t about Johnson, just as it isn’t about FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker) or Alabama Gov. George Wallace (Tim Roth), who both did their utmost to discredit and block King.
For once, this isn’t the white version of history, but neither is it a whitewash of King and his complications. We see him struggling with fidelity issues with his wife Coretta Scott King, played very well by Car- men Ejogo. At times he questions his resolve, even as he carefully calibrates how best to use the media to spread his message.
King also must deal with opposition within his own ranks, including members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who feel they are being shut out of the Selma march planning. Some of King’s supporters wonder how long the move- ment’s credo of non-violence can be maintained when peaceable protesters are being greeted with fists, truncheons and guns.
DuVernay doesn’t try to hide any of King’s shortcomings in her portrait of a dedicated but very human leader. And her film isn’t perfect, either, especially in its handling of the women in this drama, who include Oprah Winfrey in an affecting cameo as Annie Lee Cooper, one of the early pioneers of voting justice for Alabama’s black citizens.
It’s especially unfortunate that we don’t see much of Coretta Scott King in the film, especially since Ejogo’s portrayal of her is so strong, revealing much behind a veiled comment or raised eyebrow.
But it’s remarkable that Selma was made at all, considering the low production budget — DuVernay worked miracles with $20 million — and the difficulties of bringing a story like this to the screen in an industry and culture still dominated by whites.
King’s message still matters, not only to history but also to these anxious times of racial and cultural tensions in Ferguson, Mo., New York, Paris and everywhere that peace and justice are afterthoughts rather than objectives.