Ava DuVernay is a film-maker who has long been committed to a bracing cinema of ideas. Her 2016 documentary, 13th, was an investigation of the incarceration of black men and the constitutional mindset link between imprisonment and slavery in the US. It was to this film, I think, that we owed the larger revelation about the civil war: the Confederacy was not defeated like Germany was in 1945, but in fact like Germany had been in 1918 at the end of the previous world war – provisionally, and unstably.
Now she has turned to the journalist and commentator Isabel Wilkerson, the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer prize for journalism, and specifically her 2020 bestseller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The book radically challenged the concept of race in thinking about inequality and injustice and asked the reader instead to consider “caste” – larger patterns and gradations of prejudice. After all, those western observers who may well agree that there are real, essential differences between white and black and gentile and Jew may be baffled by the continuing caste injustice in India – that’s if they think about it at all – which is just as brutal as Jim Crow, although the physical differences between Dalits and the rest are surely arbitrary and illusory. As Wilkerson says, there is “racism” in India, but they are all brown.
The result is a film with urgency and heartfelt sympathy, but one which I couldn’t help thinking may have been better served as a documentary to focus more directly on the issues involved. Instead, this film is dramatised, making these ideas part of Wilkerson’s personal journey. Aunjanue Ellis gives a poised and charismatic performance as Wilkerson herself, a writer who finds in 2012 that there is something lacking in the intellectual left’s response to the Trayvon Martin shooting; the blanket condemnation of “racism” does not seem to go far or deep enough. She is herself married to a white man, Brett (a typically likable, smart performance from Jon Bernthal). She is shocked but given pause when her adored mother (a lovely performance from Emily Yancy) suggests that Martin was slightly rash in walking around the way he did, and her mother was in no way justifying the killer’s actions.
Through researching the way the Nazis drew inspiration from Jim Crow laws, Wilkerson develops a comparative approach, but is bruised by a put-down from a German academic (played by Connie Nielsen) who tells her that her attempts to draw equivalence between slavery and the Holocaust is sloppy thinking. It is in India, and the struggle of the Dalits, or untouchables, that Wilkerson finds a conceptual breakthrough. And all this time, Wilkerson is going through emotional pain: she loses her mother and her sister (Niecy Nash) and, most painfully of all, her husband, Brett.
It is here that I found the limits to DuVernay’s personal approach to the subject. Very oddly, the film doesn’t say why Brett died so heartbreakingly young, at age 46 – it was a seizure brought on by a brain tumour – and his own family background is left unexamined. Well, perhaps not everything can be covered. I loved the scene when Wilkerson reaches out to the grumpy Maga-hat-wearing plumber (a cameo from Nick Offerman), asking him about his parents, and this moment of human contact induces him to help Wilkerson fix her flooded basement. This is a film with strength and purpose.
• Origin screened at the Venice film festival.
