Selma: At Last, the Movie Martin Luther King Deserves
It’s taken far too long for Hollywood to make a big MLK film, but now it’s here, John Patterson reckons Selma’s got almost everything right
So many questions about Selma, but above all, this one: how the hell did it take this long to get a major Hollywood movie made about America’s single greatest candidate for secular sainthood, Dr Martin Luther King? It beggars belief that the man has been dead 47 years and only now are we seeing him centre-stage.
All this being noted, I’m glad that the job finally fell to an African-American woman, Ava DuVernay, who actually spent her childhood summers near Selma, Alabama, imbibing its history and community, and not to northerner Spike Lee or to patrician Oliver Stone. The controversy over the movie’s depiction of Lyndon Johnson as laggardly on issues of racial equality briefly made me reluctant to see Selma, and I lowered my expectations accordingly, given that on paper the whole movie also gave off the fiercest whiff of Oscar-bait. I was wrong on all counts.
There is some advantage to isolating the Selma campaign of 1965 from the rest of King’s life and career: that way you don’t end with the sense of failure and doubt that haunted his later campaigns but with the legal triumph of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It concentrates the story in one place during one month, a pivotal moment of King’s career, when liberal northern whites finally saw, and were galvanised into action by, the sheer crudity and brutality of the white establishment in the south – embodied here by Selma sheriff Jim Clark and Alabama governor George Wallace.
DuVernay works in tight and effective short dramatic sequences: King preparing for his 1964 Nobel acceptance speech in Oslo; four little girls murdered by a bomb in a Birmingham church; the frustrations of Selma’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members at the slow pace of non-violent civil disobedience; LBJ in confab with J Edgar Hoover; and finally, King’s summons to Selma in search of one perfectly miserable and unyielding racist redneck police chief – Jim Clark – to draw the media’s violence-hungry cameras. The scenes of the vicious dispersal of the first march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, cloaked in fog and tear gas, prompt genuine outrage and grief. So much coiled-up tension is built that its release in the final minutes is a shattering liberation.
For much of this, we can thank an exemplary ensemble of black actors, particularly those who form King’s inner circle, for replicating a spirit of embattled community idealism tempered by a realistic awareness of the mortal danger they face. Look out for a beautiful early scene, as King’s footsore team josh and joke before talking tactics. King comes off the saintly pedestal we’ve put him on and lives and breathes again. But David Oleyowo, not even nominated for best actor? A disgrace! Even LBJ gets treated better than that.
So many questions about Selma, but above all, this one: how the hell did it take this long to get a major Hollywood movie made about America’s single greatest candidate for secular sainthood, Dr Martin Luther King? It beggars belief that the man has been dead 47 years and only now are we seeing him centre-stage.
All this being noted, I’m glad that the job finally fell to an African-American woman, Ava DuVernay, who actually spent her childhood summers near Selma, Alabama, imbibing its history and community, and not to northerner Spike Lee or to patrician Oliver Stone. The controversy over the movie’s depiction of Lyndon Johnson as laggardly on issues of racial equality briefly made me reluctant to see Selma, and I lowered my expectations accordingly, given that on paper the whole movie also gave off the fiercest whiff of Oscar-bait. I was wrong on all counts.
There is some advantage to isolating the Selma campaign of 1965 from the rest of King’s life and career: that way you don’t end with the sense of failure and doubt that haunted his later campaigns but with the legal triumph of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It concentrates the story in one place during one month, a pivotal moment of King’s career, when liberal northern whites finally saw, and were galvanised into action by, the sheer crudity and brutality of the white establishment in the south – embodied here by Selma sheriff Jim Clark and Alabama governor George Wallace.
DuVernay works in tight and effective short dramatic sequences: King preparing for his 1964 Nobel acceptance speech in Oslo; four little girls murdered by a bomb in a Birmingham church; the frustrations of Selma’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members at the slow pace of non-violent civil disobedience; LBJ in confab with J Edgar Hoover; and finally, King’s summons to Selma in search of one perfectly miserable and unyielding racist redneck police chief – Jim Clark – to draw the media’s violence-hungry cameras. The scenes of the vicious dispersal of the first march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, cloaked in fog and tear gas, prompt genuine outrage and grief. So much coiled-up tension is built that its release in the final minutes is a shattering liberation.
For much of this, we can thank an exemplary ensemble of black actors, particularly those who form King’s inner circle, for replicating a spirit of embattled community idealism tempered by a realistic awareness of the mortal danger they face. Look out for a beautiful early scene, as King’s footsore team josh and joke before talking tactics. King comes off the saintly pedestal we’ve put him on and lives and breathes again. But David Oleyowo, not even nominated for best actor? A disgrace! Even LBJ gets treated better than that.
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