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Martin Luther King fights the good fight |
Cast: David Oyelowo (Martin Luther King), Tom Wilkinson (President Lyndon B. Johnson), Carmen Ejogo (Coretta Scott King), Andre Holland (Andrew Young), Tessa Thompson (Diane Nash), Giovanni Ribisi (Lee C. White), Lorraine Toussaint (Amelia Boynton Robinson), Stephan James (John Lewis), Wendell Pierce (Hosea Williams), Common (James Bevel), Alessandro Nivola (John Doar), Tim Roth (George Wallace), Oprah Winfrey (Annie Lee Cooper)

Tragically,
for a while this film seemed to be most famous for being the poster child for
“Oscar-Gate” or hashtag oscarssowhite (sorry hashtags are not my thing). Selma was the film that should have been
littered with nominations. Instead it got just two – one for Picture, one for
Best Song. Of the many, many snubs the most shocking were Ava DuVernay and
David Oyelowo, particularly as other contenders up for the awards had certainly
done inferior work that year (Steve Carrell in Foxcatcher anyone?). This film, however, categorically demands to
be remembered in its own right – it is a fine, very moving piece of work, a
dynamic history lesson that avoids preaching from a pulpit.
A lot of
this comes down to the breathtaking work from David Oyelowo, who delivers one of
those performances where the actor seems to transcend his skin, not just
imitating Martin Luther King but inhabiting him, exploring and expressing every
depth and shade. It’s a performance that stands comparison
with Daniel Day-Lewis’ Abraham Lincoln. Oyelowo’s King is a big hearted,
patient man but also a shrewd political player, a family man who betrays his
wife, a political campaigner who holds the big picture and the small in
his mind. It's a totally committed performance that is intensely respectful without ever feeling hagiographic.
Oyelowo’s
performance also immeasurably helps the film’s structure, as this is a
biography that focuses on one single key moment in its subject’s life, rather
than attempting to cover the whole lot in one 2-3 hour sitting. I rather like
this, as the important thing about these biopics is to understand the person at
the centre, not just to tick off events in their life. Anyway this film focuses
on three months in 1965: King is campaigning for equal voting rights, and
planning a high-profile march across Alabama from Selma and Montgomery to
pressure President Lyndon B Johnson to promote the Voting Rights Act.
This is a
very powerful film, humming with a constant sense of the deep rooted injustice
and oppression in America at this time. It makes no compromises in showing the
violence meted out to Black Americans, but it’s the day-to-day injustice that
DuVernay shows particularly well: in the opening scene, Annie Lee Cooper
(played by producer Oprah Winfrey) has her carefully prepared application to
vote cruelly dismissed by a smalltown clerk, gleefully and casually exploiting
a succession of legal loopholes to thwart her. It’s a simple scene but
amazingly powerful in its casual (unspoken) racism, and it brings to life in a
few strokes the day-to-day experience of millions of people at this time.
It’s also a
beautifully shot film, that uses the real-life location of the Selma bridge
spectacularly. An assault on the first attempted march by mounted policeman,
shrouded in tear gas, is deeply moving in its simplicity, the camera catching
the brutal overreaction of the police with a journalistic eye (Wendell Pierce
as Hosea Williams is particularly impressive in the build-up to, and aftermath
of, this sequence). Other moments of violence are equally shocking, but
DuVernay never over-eggs the moment, allowing the events and the story to speak
for themselves. We know how terrible some of these events are, and how
disgusting the treatment of Black Americans was – the film never uses music or
editing to hammer it home to us.
The film
ends on the kind of high note you can only feel when injustice has been
overcome and decent people triumph (punctured, DuVernay acknowledges, by the
fates of some of the characters, revealed at the end of the film. More than one of these is a gut punch – not
least the death of King himself three years later). But it’s never twee,
preachy or a history lesson. Instead it’s a living, breathing expression of a
moment in history that wraps you up in its story. Oyelowo is of course
outstanding, but there is some excellent support, not least from Carmen Ejogo
as his wife Coretta (overlooked at the time, but outstanding), Andre Holland,
Stephen James, Lorraine Toussaint and Common as King’s fellow Civil Rights
leaders. Tom Wilkinson adds a lot of depth to a sometimes thinly written Johnson, while Tim Roth translates his contempt for George Wallace in a performance
of slappable vileness. A beautiful and marvellous film.
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