It is set five decades in the past, but Ava DuVernay’s film about Martin Luther King Jr. feels shockingly timely.
Atsushi Nishijima/Paramount Pictures
Selma would be a good movie in any year. It is directed with elegance and power by Ava DuVernay (Middle of Nowhere), it is dynamically acted, and it was handsomely shot by cinematographer Bradford Young (A Most Violent Year). It closes in on Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo) during the window of the Selma to Montgomery marches, which led to the passing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, showing him as a great man but a human one, one with doubts and very justified fears. It depicts how difficult it is to effect change, and portrays nonviolent protest as a means of forcing the hate and brutality of others into the light, sometimes at a terrible cost.
It'd be a good movie any year, but given the events of the last few months, it's now an almost unbearably resonant one. I walked out of my Selma screening and into a night of demonstrations about the Eric Garner grand jury decision, protests that filled the streets of New York and cities across the country. Garner and Mike Brown are only the most recent and high-profile cases of unarmed black men dying at the hands of police officers who were then cleared of any wrongdoing, and they're indicative of a deeply disturbing trend finally generating broader outrage.
We're 50 years past the era of Selma, which begins just months after the passing of the Civil Rights Act, but race remains a stunningly divisive point in our country, and the equal rights, treatment, and opportunity that are in theory granted to everyone continue, in practice, to be denied on the basis of the color of your skin. Selma is a vivid reminder of how much our national narrative about race differs from the actual experience of being a black American, then and now, and how endemic racism and prejudice will be left as is, unless they're exposed and brought to wider attention — attention that must be battled for and fought to achieve.
Paramount Pictures
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