Tom Salinsky

After the recent cycle of American guilt-porn movies, and given the Academy’s predilection for lumpen biopics, I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to Selma but I didn’t have much of a chance to right it off in advance as I saw it prior to its UK release courtesy of Odeon’s “Screen Unseen” series of surprise movies.

Whereas 12 Years a Slave was horrifyingly brutal but structurally flawed, and The Help was ultimately a bit too twee and winsome to really succeed as a cutting evocation of America’s troubled history of racial conflict, Selma being set barely half a century ago instantly feels far more relevant and the sickening violence in Ferguson and elsewhere gives it a grim modernity which its makers can’t have anticipated.

By sensibly focusing on a small period of time – the few weeks in 1964 between Martin Luther King accepting the Nobel Peace Prize and the march from Selma to Montgomery – the movie avoids the shapelessness which dogs so many biopics, and early on director Ava DuVernay is in total control of the material, juxtaposing King in Oslo, the shocking murder by explosive of four young black girls and producer Oprah Winfrey’s neat cameo as would-be Selma voter Annie Lee Cooper, where she pulls of the neat trick of combining stoic dignity with aching vulnerability.

As the movie settles down and we meet the rest of the cast, DuVernay’s camerawork becomes a bit more pedestrian. A magnificent crane shot towards the end is eye-catching but a most of the rest is unshowy, simple and just intended to capture the performances. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but a movie ought to full the frame a bit more than a TV show and from time-to-time Selma does feel a bit movie-of-the-week, with a little too much slo-mo and a little too much omnipresent syrupy music from Jason Moran. I’m not saying DuVernay should have gone full Michael Bay on this, but a more dynamic camera would not have undermined the story at all.

Where she does succeed is in marshalling a terrific cast, and balancing the sub-plots with the main story. Without ever taking energy away from the central thread, we get glimpses into the lives of King’s loyal followers such as James Bevel (Common), James Orange (Omar Dorsey) and Diane Nash (Tessa Thompson); we see the uneasy relationship between the two young men already working in Selma for voting rights; we see the earnest white folks who rally to the cause, not all of whom make it out of Selma alive.

It helps that we get some familiar faces in this sprawling cast like Lorraine Toussaint, from HBO’s Orange is the New Black and Wendell Pierce from The Wire, because we’re not done yet. As well as the law enforcement on the ground in Selma, we also have a brilliantly reptilian turn from Tim Roth as Governor George Wallace, and blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameos from Cuba Gooding Jr and Martin Sheen, not to mention Carmen Ejogo who does a great deal with very little as King’s ever-patient wife.

There are a couple of loose threads. Dylan Baker appears in only about two scenes as J Edgar Hoover and irritating captions keep appearing which remind us that the FBI is spying on the Kings, while giving us further information we already know – but the FBI storyline never amounts to anything. Even more bizarrely, Nigel Thatch appears in exactly one scene as Malcolm X, is never seen to meet King and then dies off-screen.

Then main conflict then is between Tom Wilkinson’s rangy Lyndon B Johnson (fascinating to compare this performance with Bryan Cranston’s approach which I was privileged to see on Broadway last year) and David Oyelowo’s electrifying King. Pitting Johnson’s compassionate pragmatism against King’s fiery idealism is a fascinating dichotomy and the scenes between them are wonderfully handled. Being shamefully unfamiliar with the details of King’s story, I was struck by the shocking nature of his tactics – broadly to mount nonviolent protests in the hope that the other side will retaliate with violence. The movie is unafraid both to criticise this approach and also to consider the cost on King’s personal life as he knowingly puts young men and women into harm’s way in order to achieve a greater good, but ultimately it becomes clear that progress would be unlikely to be achieved in any other way.

Smartly surrounding him with a rich cast of supporting characters, DuVernay is nevertheless happy to let Oyelowo off the leash from time-to-time and my word does he tear up the part when he needs to. He is absolutely magnificent, embodying Dr King with fire and passion and integrity in a way which seems almost impossible for a British public school-boy to pull off. And a further hat-tip to DuVernay who is apparently responsible for writing new speeches for him to say, when the original Martin Luther King speeches were not available. That must have been a daunting project to say the least!

So, this is not the most ambitious film on the list, nor is it the most formally daring. But it is a compelling story, well-told, with a world-class performance at its centre and a deep pool of acting talent in support. That it was so widely overlooked by the Academy is absolutely baffling, particularly Oyelowo’s performance, and particularly the screenplay, if only for those astonishing speeches.

I haven’t seen Steve McQueen’s earlier efforts, Hunger (which friends of mine hated) and Shame (which friends of mine loved) and as noted in my earlier post, I was a little wary of guilt porn here. It’s not that the brutal horrors of the American slave trade need not be recreated on film, it’s more a question of what can McQueen add to what has been depicted already. Slim Pickens opting to save a handcart from quicksand but leaving his slaves to their doom in Blazing Saddles is shocking and funny, but Blazing Saddles was a long time ago.

The recent cycle of Hollywood movies examining America’s racist past has so failed to produce a major movie which wasn’t either twee (The Help), focused only on politics (Lincoln) or simply demented (Django Unchained) so there is maybe a need for a movie like this, just as there was, arguably, a need for Schindler’s List to be made, which almost trumps any conversation about the film’s actual merits as a piece of cinema.

Well, I don’t really think I’m sticking my neck out too far when I say that broadly speaking I think slavery was A Bad Thing and so I’m not surprised to have left the cinema sickened and horrified by the brutalisation of those poor unfortunate wretches who found themselves owned by other humans. But overall, I didn’t leave the cinema feeling that this was a magnificent piece of film-making. Important, yes. Necessary, possibly. Deeply felt, almost certainly. But free of flaw? That’s another matter.

The story, just in case you didn’t know, concerns one Solomon Northup, living as a free man in Saratoga, New York, who unwisely accepts the invitation of a couple of white strangers to come and play violin with them in Washington (where slavery is still legal). After imbibing a Mickey Finn, he comes to in chains, and is told that his name is now Platt and that he is free no longer. He is passed from owner to owner until, well, the title of the film kind of spoils the ending.

As might be expected, McQueen and cinematographer Sean Bobbit compose the shots wonderfully, holding on certain images for much longer than might be expected which gives them a stark beauty, even if what is being depicted is horrendously inhumane. And McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley assemble any number of individual scenes of tremendous power – the slave trader touting his wares, the plantation owner’s wife who hurls a decanter at the comely young slave woman who is her husband’s favourite, Northup desperately lying his way out of trouble at knife-point when his letters to his wife and children are discovered, and most shockingly of all, Northup forced to whip another slave to the point of death. Guilt porn? Maybe just a little, but McQueen’s camera – neither cold, dispassionate observer like Michael Hanneke’s, nor soaringly emotive like Spielberg’s – makes you feel every horrible lash.

However, where the filmmakers stumble is in their failure to successfully link individual scenes together to make arresting sequences. This is a film full of unnecessary stops-and-starts, with far too many one-or-two scene guest stars (Paul Giamatti, Brad Pitt, Alfre Woodard, Michael K Williams, Sal off of Mad Men) breaking up the flow. Almost no element of the story carries over from one scene to the next, and several key moments are robbed of their power, either because the context is missing, or in one case, the bizarre choice to show that moment as a very early flash-forward before the film has really got going.

It’s also striking to me that, in common with Schindler’s List, McQueen has chosen a very particular, very unusual slave story to tell, just as Spielberg didn’t want to tell a tale of everyday ordinary Auschwitz folk. Oskar Schindler’s perspective on the Nazi holocaust is utterly unique and the moral calculus which he performs gives a very specific lens through which to view the terrors of the Final Solution. In theory, Northup’s position does the same. Although many free black man and women were kidnapped by the slave trade, almost none escaped to tell the tale, and so Northup’s story is very unusual, and he also makes an excellent viewpoint character. How much easier for McQueen’s affluent, free audience to identify with a man who had everything they had but had it snatched away?

And yet the demands of the plot mean that we only very occasionally get this perspective. Northup is told early on – tell no-one who you really are, tell no-one you can read and write – and so most of the time, he looks and sounds like all the other slaves and this opportunity for a new vantage point is at the very least muted. That’s why it is so frustrating to see his early attempts at writing a letter thrown away as an unnecessary throw-forward. It’s also striking that his eventual release is dealt with in an almost perfunctory manner, in the last few minutes of the film, and his reunion with his family and rehabilitation after the agonies he has suffered provide none of the expected catharsis.

So, why is this and why does nobody else care? Well, there’s a perception that a well-crafted screenplay with neat set-ups and payoffs is formulaic or cheating. This I think is very far from the truth. Obviously, such a thing can be done badly and when the plot gears grind too loudly, one can no longer believe in the events depicted. But even to do this badly takes a lot more effort than what has apparently been done here – make a list of the noteworthy events in Northup’s 12 years’ incarceration and then run them in sequence until he is released. But maybe this stop-start, never building, never crescendoing quality is deliberate? Either to make the film seem more important, or to make it seem more authentic, or to give it the grinding, never-ending, soul-crushing feeling of a life in servitude.

None of these seem to me to be defensible positions. The Shawshank Redemption, for example, free of the perceived need to tell an important story about a terrible human tragedy manages to be authentically relentless, and well-structured, and even to include moments of grace and beauty which Slave can’t or won’t. And it’s not like writing the script didn’t involve making a thousand creative decisions about what to include, what to leave out, what to emphasise, what to overlook and how to paper over the gaps in Northup’s account. All of these choices certainly have been made – this is not a documentary and it certainly doesn’t suffer from walking Wikipedia entry syndrome like say, Behind the Candelabra.

Thankfully, this shortcoming ultimately does very little to undermine what is essentially a very fine piece of film-making. The performances are excellent throughout, with especial praise going to Fassbender and newcomer Lupita Nyong’o who I think must now be a shoo-in for Best Supporting Actress for her heart-rending turn as the luckless Patsey. But it’s on Chiwetel Ejiofor’s sturdy shoulders that the whole enterprise rests and he is nothing short of magnificent. When McQueen’s camera hangs on his face, impassive and yet hauntingly expressive, he is able to take the disparate bits and pieces of Northup’s life and somehow braid them together in the way he stares at the horizon. In those moments, the film achieves an almost terrible beauty and an almost unbearable sadness.

Edited 2/2/14 to correct some errors of fact and poor phrasing picked up by commenters – thank you.