Origin Review: Ava DuVernay’s clever drama should be a documentary

Ava DuVernay is an accomplished theater director who knows how to create a human story around a crusade idea without one overwhelming the other. She proved that in 2014 Selma, her biopic about Martin Luther King Jr., which focuses on the Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches in 1965. But DuVernay is also a documentary filmmaker: her fiery Netflix film 13about the prison-industrial complex, proved that she doesn’t rely on the reassuring additions of story and character to make a compelling point.

These two sides of the director are fighting for control over Originan ambitious adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s non-fiction bestseller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent. The film, which chronicles the personal tragedies of Wilkerson’s life as she conceptualizes and researches the book, is an uncomfortable mix of these two approaches, neither of which fully succeeds. It’s a drama that wants to be documentary, and it’s at its best when it unwinds Wilkerson’s intriguing ideas to the fullest.

The film begins with Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, floating in personal limbo after the publication of her first book. She’s happily married and her husband Brett (Jon Bernthal) is a practical rock and intelligent sounding board for her ideas. But the decision to put her mother Ruby (Emily Yancy) in a nursing home is difficult for her and she is afraid to take on a new project. To get her to write again, her editor suggests she look into the murder of Trayvon Martin. The case stirs something in Wilkerson: a counterintuitive, almost repugnant urge to look beyond mere racism as an explanation.

The book that ultimately emerges is caste, which attempts to recontextualize American racism and the Black American experience as aspects of a caste system – a millennia-old phenomenon of human society that can and often does operate entirely independently of race. Wilkerson finds connections and similarities between slavery and Jim Crow in the United States, the Indian caste system and the subjugation of the Dalit people (formerly known as the “untouchables”), and the dehumanization of Jews in Nazi Germany, which ended in the Holocaust. Wilkerson argues that racism may be a byproduct or manifestation of a larger, more universal human evil: the stratification of society into separate castes of people who are viewed without rational reason as inferior or superior, as subhuman or superhuman.

This is really interesting, thought-provoking stuff, and it’s no wonder that DuVernay (who wrote Origin(The script) is so anxious to get those ideas across. She does: When it comes to articulating the core concepts of Wilkerson’s book, Origin is clear and convincing, which is perhaps the only measure of success that should matter for a film like this. But while the film serves the book well, it does a poor job of fulfilling its own dramatic story and fails as a film—ironically because DuVernay is so concerned with finding an understandable, relatable framework for these ideas.

So The audience spends most of it Origin She watched Ellis-Taylor travel, debate, and interview, nodding sagely as she took notes or frowning with compassion and sadness. DuVernay finds a dramatic driver in Wilkerson’s sad personal story – she experienced several devastating losses during her research caste – but she never manages to make a connection between these events and the true content of the film, which is Wilkerson’s thesis. (Origin spends an enigmatic time with Wilkerson deciding what to do with her mother’s house – enigmatic until that subplot provides a labored metaphor in the film’s final scenes.) With all due respect to both Wilkerson and Ellis-Taylor, she makes a dignified appearance, the story “sad writer grieves, has thoughts, writes a good book” may be inspiring, but it doesn’t seem relevant to the ideas it presents.

Occasionally, however, the scenes from Wilkerson’s life sparkle with energy thanks to a skillful cast. Nick Offerman plays an ornery plumber in a MAGA hat who inspects his mother’s wet basement. In the film’s most sensitive scene, Connie Nielsen plays a Berlin intellectual who refuses to accept an equation between slavery and the Holocaust. Audra McDonald is wonderful as Miss Hale, a friend of Wilkerson’s who explains the complex social dynamics of the name “Miss” in an effective anecdote.

But Origin invariably generates more interest when it delves into the past to reconstruct some of the historical materials Wilkerson uses in her argument. The story of four young anthropologists – two married couples, one white, one black – who secretly settled on both sides of the divide in 1930s Mississippi to research a groundbreaking book could be a film in itself. And there is an astonishing, damning scene from a transcript of a Nazi Party meeting in the early 1930s in which the Nazis study America’s Jim Crow laws as a blueprint for the separation and dehumanization of the Jewish people.

These stories and the context in which Wilkerson places them are powerful. The almost comical shots of Ellis-Taylor organizing stacks of books in voiceover, writing on a whiteboard and typing on a laptop while tying up her suitcase are just shockingly precious. It’s easy to imagine a documentary version of this Origin that’s more like it 13, piecing together the historical reconstructions through archival footage, talking head interviews and biographical information about Wilkerson. It could have been just as compelling and much more satisfying and coherent. But the takeaway is still the same, and one that I want to put into action myself: buy a copy caste and read it.

Origin is now in the cinema. Check out the film’s website for local listings.