Five stars. Rated PG-13, laudably but a bit generously, despite considerable grim violence, dramatic intensity and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.9.15
The images are sickening, their
motivation heinous.
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| Having led a group of peaceful protestors during a voting rights march that concludes in front of the Selma County courthouse steps, Martin Luther King (David Oyelowo, center rear) and his followers wait to see what will happen next. It won't be pretty... |
Only two decades removed from the
post-WWII revelations of how atrociously German-based Jewish citizens had been
treated by their own countrymen — up to brutal slaughter — the United States
was turning an equally blind eye toward the similarly appalling behavior of
Alabama cops who, protected by the imprimatur of authority, assaulted and
killed their black neighbors with the gleeful enthusiasm of jack-booted Nazi
thugs.
If that isn’t sufficient irony,
consider this: Much of America first learned of these contemptible circumstances
on March 7, 1965 — remembered, to this day, as our own “Bloody Sunday” — when
ABC interrupted an evening movie to show live footage of peaceful black
citizens being tear-gassed and beaten by state and local cops in Selma, Ala.
The film in question? The television premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg.
The source of all this
white-cracker rage?
The audacity of these black citizens,
who insisted on exercising their right to vote. The situation was particularly
pernicious in Alabama, and notably in Selma, where only 130 of its roughly 15,000
black residents had successfully become voters. Most had been foiled by local
registrars who routinely demanded answers to absurdly difficult civics
questions.
Director Ava DuVernay opens her
riveting new film, Selma, with just such an encounter. A quietly dignified
Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey) makes what we realize is the most recent of
many such trips to the county registrar’s office, only to be thwarted anew by a
sneering white clerk who, irritated by her correct answers to his first two questions,
responds with an impossible third.
It’s a brilliantly clever
prologue by DuVernay and scripter Paul Webb, and not merely for the unsettling
calm with which the scene is staged: the immediate implication that this is
disenfranchised business as usual. DuVernay also secures calmly understated
performances from both actors: the determined but wearily pragmatic Winfrey on
one side, the pugnacious Clay Chappell on the other.
It’s a landmark cinematic moment:
a scene destined to be memorialized, and oft resurrected, for decades to come.
And it succinctly depicts the
fetid racist swamp into which Martin Luther King Jr. waded in early 1965, fresh
from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize and having been named “Man of the Year” by
Time Magazine, which dubbed him “the American Gandhi.”
