FLICKERS

Review: Origin

ORIGIN

Watching Origin, the mind-stirring new film from writer-director Ava DuVernay, I found myself leaning forward, the way you do when a friend you haven’t seen in a long time relates an intensely personal tale of loss or love or both. University students no doubt do the same when Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian portrayed in the film by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, stands before them, lecturing. Wilkerson’s 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents became a surprise bestseller during the pandemic. For the unlikely film version, DuVernay, who is skilled in both documentary (13th) and docudrama (Selma, When They See Us), sets out to bring Wilkerson’s ideas to a wide audience by placing the author’s life and the history she unearths side by side. The result is both unwieldy and deeply moving. 

Here is a rare and excellent thing — a major dramatic feature about a Black woman intellectual. DuVernay is blessed in Ellis-Taylor, who played the Williams sisters' mother in the tennis drama King Richard. She has a great gift for both elucidating arcane ideas and for filling Wilkerson’s many moments of solitary reflection with resonant meaning. The author suffers a great personal loss just as she’s about to begin her book project. Ellis-Taylor infuses Wilkerson’s intellectual journey with the abiding current of that loss. 

In the first of many historical reenactments, DuVernay begins with the February 2012 shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost) by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida. It’s a heartbreaking sequence. When a magazine editor (Blair Underwood) asks the film’s Isabel to write about the case, she resists, but after listening to the 911 calls from Zimmerman and a neighbor who heard Martin crying out, she knows she must dig deeper. (The film utilizes the real 911 tapes.)

Isabel is troubled by the terminology we use to describe such events. Zimmerman may have been a racist, but was there something more at work? “Racism as the primary language to understand everything is insufficient,” Isabel tells her editor.

She is fascinated by the story of a German factory worker (Finn Wittrock) in love with a Jewish woman (Victoria Pedretti) who was captured in a photograph crossing his arms and refusing to salute Hitler like the workers around him. In the Nazi structure, Isabel sees an example of the caste system, a social hierarchy rooted in the accepted superiority of one class of people over another.

The most famous such system existed in India, where Dalits, or “untouchables,” have long been made to live in barren poverty while performing the most demeaning of social services. Late in the film, a scene depicting a man toiling deep into a vat of human excrement is juxtaposed against recreations of the Middle Passage of enslaved Africans as well as Jews being separated upon arrival at a concentration camp. This quick collage of harrowing imagery, while familiar to many, feels essential to this moment of a faltering collective memory.

Isabel begins her work by traveling first to Germany, where she stands one night before the shining light of “The Empty Library,” a public memorial to a 1933 book burning by Nazi Party university students, the reenactment of which may reverberate for moviegoers against memories of recent hate marches here in America. In Berlin, she’s shown documents revealing a 1933 meeting of Nazi lawyers who found in American Jim Crow laws all the inspiration they needed to begin preparing German society to accept “the Final Solution.”

The first hour of Origin moves in fits and starts, as if the filmmaker, like Isabel, is finding her way toward a unifying structure. At the film’s midpoint, Isabel attends a family picnic and begins explaining (or over-explaining) her thesis to her loyal cousin Marion (a marvelous Niecy Nash-Betts). “One more time, in English,” Marion says. “A little less Pulitzer Prize.” She continues, “Make it plain,” and as if heeding that call, DuVernay’s storytelling becomes more focused and direct. 

It’s in the rich details of the personal that Origin soars. In one beautiful scene, the presence of which seems meant to suggest that the people in our very own lives have a living history worth documenting, Isabel records the remembrance of Miss (Audra McDonald), a longtime friend. Miss’ story of a belittling high school principal contains gratitude toward her father even as its specifics fill her with both pain and anger, a range of emotions that ripple across McDonald’s face all at once. Hers is a brief, classic performance. 

Origin is challenging. It requires us to participate, to lean in, to listen. I’ve seen it twice and though I can see that it could be shorter and is sometimes didactic, its rewards are many, not least among them the affecting tenderness with which Isabel and those she loves approach one another. And in a season of good movies, you might be hard pressed to find a sequence as indelible as the final story Isabel is told. It involves a nine-year-old African American baseball player (Lennox Simms) circa 1951, who isn’t allowed to celebrate a championship victory with his white teammates. Like Trayvon Martin and the faces of so many whose histories momentarily intersect with Isabel’s, he’s unforgettable.

Chuck Wilson

Review: All of Us Strangers

ALL OF US STRANGERS

By Chuck Wilson

    The brilliant and emotionally gripping All of Us Strangers, from writer-director Andrew Haigh, opens with a nearly 50-year-old screenwriter named Adam (Andrew Scott) looking out over London as the sun rises. He’s in a new high-rise apartment, and Haigh places Adam’s reflection against the window glass so that it hovers, ghost-like, over the city. That’s apt because this is a movie about grief and ghosts (and new love, too) but it’s also about a successful man who’s a bit opaque, who’s not fully present in his life. He’s there, but also not. 

     Adam’s parents died in a car crash when he was 12. His new screenplay appears to be about that loss but so far, all he’s written is: “Suburban house, 1987”. After opening a box of mementos, among them a Christmas tree angel, dinosaur toys and an old-school flip lighter, Adam is inspired by a photo of his childhood home to take a train to his hometown and to that house. Nearby, while walking, he is drawn to follow a familiar-looking mustached man, who lights a cigarette (with the same lighter from the memento box, perhaps) and invites Adam to follow him. “Where?” Adam asks. “Home,” says the man. 

    And so it is that Adam’s father (Jamie Bell) takes him to the family home, which is warmly lit, and where, at the door, they’re greeted by Adam’s mother (Claire Foy). The parents know its Adam because they recognize his eyes. Inside, they bustle about, pouring drinks, lighting cigarettes and asking how Adam’s life has turned out—they’ve had many theories. They’re amazed that he’s a writer. Adam’s face turns pink with pleasure, a son who’s made his parents proud. 

     Someone puts on a record—the 1980s needle drops in this movie are sumptuous—and the parents dance, a couple in love. Adam leans against a door jamb, quiet, smiling, drinking them in. The hour grows late and as he leaves, the parents urge Adam to come back.

     Adam does return, more than once, and if he is indeed visiting with ghosts, it seems the most natural thing in the world. Adam comes out as gay to his mother, who is startled and says all the wrong things. Later, his father admits to having heard Adam crying himself to sleep after being bullied at school. Adam asks why he never came in to comfort him and the father’s reply is harsh but so honest Adam can’t be upset. One night, in a long and moving sequence, Adam sleeps over to celebrate Christmas. After decorating the tree, parents and son take a group photo just like the one in Adam’s old photo album. Something is being healed here. 

     Back in his London flat, Adam had begun an affair with Harry (Paul Mescal), who first appeared at his door a bit drunk, swinging a Japanese liquor bottle, and offering company. Twenty years younger than Adam, the scruffily handsome Harry seems adrift, in the building and in life. Adam initially rebuffed Harry but seeing his parents has set him in motion. He’s writing, and suddenly, there’s no good reason to be alone, day after day. For the first time in a long time (or maybe ever), Adam wants someone to dance with, too. 

     In an expansive adaptation of a 1987 novel by the Japanese writer Taichi Yamada, Haigh, who made the classic film, Weekend (2011), but may be best known in America for the HBO series, Looking, has written a four character film set in two locations that never feels stagey or stilted. The dialogue is the finest in recent memory, and so intimate as to be overwhelming. This movie continually causes a hush to settle over your heart. 

     Adam and Harry make love and then lay entwined, sharing histories and discovering that they share a common sense of otherness, despite the progress that’s been made for queer people. “It’s funny,” Adam says, “It doesn’t take much to make you  feel the way you felt. Back there again, skin all raw”. 

     Harry gives Adam a place to bring the outsized feelings that are being stirred by the visits home but there is a sense that it’s becoming too much, for Adam, for everyone. Good things have come from the journeys home—Adam’s “tangled” heart is becoming less so—but time and the universe can only bend so much.     

    In its final act, All of Us Strangers echoes the hilltop cemetery goodbye in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, only here the dead are fully invested in the living which makes the words that must be said all the more crushing. These closing scenes are so beautifully acted by the film’s brilliant quartet of actors that the simple purity of performance will likely prove moving, even for those who find themselves resisting Haigh’s otherworldly metaphysics. For moviegoers who give themselves over to this remarkable film and its four sorrowful humans, something akin to glory awaits.