Controversy Aside, Is The Martin Luther King Biopic ‘Selma’ Any Good?

It’s a shame so much of the public discussion of Ava DuVernay’s Selma centres on controversies peripheral to the film. For one, DuVernay and her cast are widely considered to have been snubbed by Oscar. No doubt, but why should it matter? Why do the film and the history it tells need to be validated by little gold statuettes anyway? Meanwhile a few pernicious pundits have dismissed the film’s historical accuracy, saying it should have given more credit to President Lyndon B. Johnson or that it outright makes him a villain. (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.) This is more toxic, as it feeds a narrative in which black Americans were gifted with civil rights by the government, rather than winning them with years of struggle.

Red herrings these debates may be, but sadly they serve to highlight what’s wrong with racial politics in Hollywood. What we should be talking about, instead of LBJ and Oscar, is what this film does to reinvigorate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr, with both style and bold contemporary context.

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Ditching The ‘Rocky’ Montage: A Biopic Without Inspiration Porn

Selma is the first major film about King. Even before the events last year that brought the struggle against institutionalised racism in the US back into the headlines, there was a lot at stake. MLK represents so much to so many, and though his assassination took place almost 47 years ago, he seems like such a familiar presence in our lives. His voice is as recognisable as it is inimitable. How do you recreate that voice? For that reason alone – even aside from politics – it’s no wonder Hollywood has shied away.

Before now I would have said that was a good thing. In general, the more revered the subject, the more formulaic the biopic. Last year’s frustratingly mediocre 42: The Jackie Robinson Story is a relevant example: more montage than movie, a morass of clichés seemingly programmed by bots, washed over by maddeningly obvious music cues and a hazy golden filter, snuffing out any real emotion or human inspiration. Biopics like Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (also very relevant) that break the rules are the exception.

Selma doesn’t try to be Malcolm X. It’s not out to tell the epic story of a life. It’s not even exactly a film about MLK, though he looms large over it of course. It’s a film about a movement, during a specific crisis. As the title indicates, it’s also about a place. In the lexicon of American history, the name of that small town in Alabama is synonymous with the protest marches that originated there in 1965. The marches were resisted with infamous brutality by local police and white supremacists but eventually culminated in the Voting Rights Act. “Selma” means struggle, and it means overcoming.

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No White Saviours: Telling Stories With Different Voices

DuVernay says the film is all about strategy. The plot of the film concerns the chess game that King, his colleagues in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and their allies – yes, including LBJ (Tom Wilkinson) – play against the hostile authorities and with each other. It’s fascinating in its practical detail. Like Steven Spielberg’s masterful Lincoln, which it often reminded me of, Selma is about high-stakes negotiation, the day-to-day minutia of hammering out history. It’s also about building community, and activism at the grassroots level. It’s a film that has time for people, time to explore the homes, churches and streets they inhabit. It’s telling that even the big stars in the cast, like Common and Oprah Winfrey are mostly absorbed into their roles as freedom fighters banded together in a collective effort. Perhaps this is the objection of some: that its focus is on the ground, not so much in the halls of power.

More to the point, its focus is on black people and black action (though their white allies are portrayed sensitively). So many films about the Civil Rights era have featured white saviours – Mississippi Burning, Driving Miss Daisy, The Long Walk Home, The Help. It’s important that a black woman is telling black history here, and telling it so well. It shows in the ways her characters are allowed to breathe, be themselves, inhabit their world, talk slang, feel real and relevant to the present.

Selma’s biggest strength is in the human rhythms of its dialogue, which bypasses the clipped, stagey banter of generic biopics. When David Oyelowo’s King talks, he sounds like a real person. (It’s worth noting his real-life speeches were rewritten due to copyright issues, with positive results.) And he listens to people – as in the deliberately paced scene between King and the grandfather of an activist slain by police: wrenching in its quiet, intimate grief.

Yes, DuVernay makes some conventional moves here; Selma does things you expect historical biopics to do. There are a few montages. There are sentimental music cues. It worked for me; sometimes you need broad strokes to paint history. Elsewhere, DuVernay shows her arthouse roots, and things get really interesting. Late in the film, King drives a young colleague home; the conversation between two tired, depressed men searching for hope is shot with unusual formalism, their faces hidden by weird angles or flickering shadows. It’s eerie and touching.

The tired biopic tradition of the long-suffering wife is transformed brilliantly (no surprise with a woman at the helm): King’s relationship with his wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo) is delicate and complex. Her importance to the movement is clear (especially during a tense private negotiation with Malcolm X), but the impact of the mission on family life is heavy. In one of Selma’s best scenes, she patiently confronts him over supposedly incriminating sex tapes sent to her by anonymous feds. (The FBI surveillance of King, often left out of history books, is prominent in the film.) The terrific dialogue, punctuated by silence, is provocative, funny and terribly sad at once.

Gutsy choices on DuVernay’s part when dealing with a man of King’s stature, but she’s portraying a human being, not a saint. He’s a man with a temper, a sense of humour, paralysing doubts. During one moment of frustration he lights up a cigarette. It’s a tricky balance between that and investing the role with the required gravity, and Oyelowo mostly pulls it off, seemingly channelling King’s spirit more the closer the film gets to its final confrontation. It’s not an impression but an interpretation, and a powerful one at that. The film wouldn’t work without it.

When we finally do see MLK’s saintly side, it feels earned. There’s a powerful scene near the climax where he brings a march to a sudden unexpected halt, gets on his knees and quietly prays; the multitude behind him follows suit in stunned silence. The messianic symbolism is beautifully organic; one of many ways the film gently emphasises the faith that was so integral to the movement. The King depicted here is a deeply spiritual man who prays, who quotes the Bible in his jail cell, who rings his friend Mahalia Jackson in the middle of the night so he can hear the Lord’s voice.

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Basically, It’s A Really Good Movie

Despite all the talk about talk, Selma is rousing cinema. Thus far known for two microbudget family dramas (one of which, Middle of Nowhere, brought her the best director prize at Sundance), DuVernay handles the scope of this tale as well as Spielberg or Lee would have. It’s a beautiful film, with sombre, moody interiors balanced by brightly lit, stirring action setpieces. When the tension of all the wheeling and dealing unloads into conflict, the violence is all the more shocking, and DuVernay doesn’t flinch away from it. She shows us police beating kids and middle-aged ladies, the terror of people choking on tear gas, bruises, blood, charging horses. During these scenes Selma resembles a war film.

They should also remind us of current events. Selma was already in production when Eric Garner and Michael Brown were killed, but the similarity to the protests of 50 years later is hardly coincidental. DuVernay has her eye on the big picture. The film shows that the Civil Rights movement was not as polite and, well, civil as we might be led to believe by soft-focus TV tributes and memes about peace and love. It was messy, loud and angry. It was a fight, though a nonviolent one on the activists’ part. As one SCLC leader says in the film, nonviolence is not weakness; it’s strength. In Selma, King seems like a general leading an army (however unarmed) into battle, and he openly admits he needs conflict to achieve his goals. The onscreen violence makes the courage required all the more breathtaking.

No way could you come away from Selma with a whitewashed version of MLK’s message of liberation. Throughout the film, King specifically names the racist power structure as a problem, decries police brutality and the murder of black people, and calls for systemic change. King was, among many other things, an uncompromising black leader – something that a lot people in Hollywood and beyond clearly still aren’t comfortable with.

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Selma is in Australian cinemas now.

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Jim Poe is a writer, DJ, and editor based in Sydney. He tweets from @fivegrand1