Selma is based on
the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches led by Martin Luther King,
Jr., James Bevel, and Hosea Williams, of the SCLC and the SNCC.
I didn’t like Selma,
and it has nothing to do with the controversies it’s been involved in; it’s
because it isn’t really that great of a movie.
The cinematography is nothing special; the scenes are lit
well, and it’s color-corrected to match the time period, but DuVernay and
cinematographer Bradford Young don’t do anything that interesting with the
camera. Sure, the camera goes handheld when the action picks up, uses slow
motion at times to accentuate some chaos, and while the camerawork never gets
so hectic that it alienates the viewer, it also doesn’t do anything special in
itself to be that praiseworthy. It’s good technique in itself, but nothing great.
The movie’s pace is slow; building a tension that boils over
at just the right times. Outside of that, Selma
is a bit of a mess. In its defense, it has a lot of ground to cover, but doesn’t
really do a good job at keeping us informed about the amount of time that is
passing by. When it does, it uses these weird little graphics with an FBI seal
and a typewriter sound effect, like we are supposed to be watching the film from
a government surveillance point of view. What makes this extra weird is that J.
Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI at the time, was in the movie for about three
minutes, and has no real impact on the film as a whole. The story is much more
about King and President Lyndon Johnson, which is also a problem because they
have the same exact conversation four or five times throughout the movie.
At times, David Oyelowo’s performance as Dr. King is
transformative. At times. There are
other times when the movie screeches to a halt because Oyelowo is having such a
hard time chewing on King’s southern accent and rhetoric. With all the vocal
inconsistencies and shoddy dialogue, it made for a just very good performance.
To say it outright, David Oyelowo’s performance was not Oscar-worthy.
The same goes for nearly all the other
non-naturally-American accented performers in the film, too. I normally have no
problems with performers not having perfect accents, even if they are playing a
real person, but Selma was tough for
me to get through. The film has Tim Roth, Tim
Roth, trying to do a southern accent. This problem is especially noticeable
when preceding or following scenes have actor Stephen Root, who does a great
southern accent, in them. This problem causes many of the performances in Selma to fall flat, and adds extra inconsistency
to an already messy film.
In addition to not being well accented, most of the
supporting cast members are bland and one-dimensional. Several characters are around
because they needed to be in order to move the plot forward. Coretta Scott King
was there because she is Mrs. King, and had to ask Malcolm X for help for some
reason. She is also strangely written and directed to be this embodiment of disapproval
that ominously looms over Dr. King’s shoulder. Did you know that Common is in
Selma? It doesn’t matter; he has like four throwaway lines. President Lyndon
Johnson is played by Tom Wilkinson, but with the way it’s written it could’ve
be played by any old white guy and it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference. The
only interesting supporting character is Giovanni Ribisi as Lee C. White, and
that’s because Ribisi is a weird dude to begin with. Apparently White was an
important advisor to President Johnson; could’ve fooled me.
What bothers me is that DuVernay has talked extensively
about how hard it was determining what characters were important, who needed to
be added, subtracted, etc., but then made any character not named Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. relatively unimportant. She did an excellent job at writing
speeches for Dr. King without using any material from the actual speeches, and
she should be praised for that, I guess, but outside of that, she didn’t turn
in an astounding script overall, and that turned into a not great movie.
I can imagine that all of this reads like nitpicking, but
this movie was nominated for Best Picture, and I simply don’t feel like this
movie should be in the conversation with the others this year.
Furthermore, I don’t think this somewhat inaccurate retelling
of a real event really adds anything to the current conversation about racism. Now
before you start wagging your finger at me because of what I said in my Whiplash review about historical correctness,
let me be clear: I understand the inaccuracies were to help DuVernay tell her
story the way she wanted to, and she is under no real obligation to make her
fictional film about a real event historically accurate. That being said, Selma’s inaccuracies caricature both
parties in a way that makes you disapprovingly shake your head at America’s
mistakes regarding the Civil Rights movement without making you think about the
issues it represents any differently. Hell, the most revelatory part of the
movie is that song at the end written by John Legend and Lonnie Lynn. Wait, who
the hell is Lonnie Lynn? Oh hey, that’s Common. Ah, that’s why he was in the movie!
For all my criticism, Selma
is a good movie. It was well-produced, not completely ugly, and above-averagely
acted. Unfortunately its inconsistencies and story issues make it nothing
particularly special, and I feel that the film has started some misguided conversations
about lack of diversity/sexism/racism in films and filmmaking. See it
eventually.
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