There is a moment in Selma, when Martin Luther King, Jr. makes a spontaneous decision to abort the second attempt by civil rights protestors to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge and march on to Montgomery. He had just knelt down in prayer, in apparent gratitude for the state troopers’ having been ordered to let them pass, and all of the hundreds behind him had followed his lead. He looks down the bridge, at the long road through Alabama, and turns back into the crowd, walking back through them—no words, no speech, total silence, but a clear signal that this march is canceled for now.
Later, his action is explained. For a variety of reasons, he was worried that the apparent olive-branch from the Alabama authorities of this time being permitted to cross the bridge was a ruse—once well-down the road, in defiance of a judge’s order, with no backing yet from the President, his marchers might be viciously attacked. Was this the right judgment? A lot of his allies didn’t think so—they thought the momentum was with them, and that if Governor Wallace was willing to let them suffer attacks down the road, with their ranks temporarily beefed-up by white clergy volunteers, this would provoke the nation to action upon the voting issue. Moreover, several were furious that King had used his position at the head of the march to make the decision himself, undemocratically. As he walked back through the marchers, some disappointed, even angry eyes, turned his way.
But as John Lewis explains later on, that action took great bravery on King’s part. To have called all these people from Selma and all over the country to have joined you in this most dangerous protest, and then, out of fear for their safety, to have led them back, just as they had brought themselves to a high pitch of resolution, at the brink of apparent victory, and all on the basis of an uncertain intuition or word from God, indicating that moving forward would be a mistake!
Well, fifty years later, another group of good people came together, this one to commemorate the civil rights movement and the events at Selma by making a motion picture. I feel bad for them, for the truth is that they needed a King or two, just at the moment when everyone was poised to move forward, who had the courage to act upon the gut-sense surely being felt by many of them that this whole thing just doesn’t feel right.
For Selma drags. As cinema, it is a failure. The lead actor just doesn’t have it, the pacing is sluggish, and worst of all, the screenplay largely fails to sculpt an interesting story out of the events in question. In scene after scene, something simply does not click. Even in what has rightly been labeled the motion picture industry’s worst year ever, this film is notable for its flatness. The director, Ava DuVernay, bears much blame, but no-one could have done much good with this script by writer Paul Webb. The notion a few voices have raised, angered by the absence of black-oriented films and black actors on the Oscar nomination list generally, that it was an injustice not to nominate it for best picture, is absurd. Such folks are letting their reverence for Dr. King blind them from admitting what any honest movie-goer will. The most charitable judgment possible is that the film is mediocre.
That does not mean it is outright bad. As commemoration, it is endurable the way a windy, tad foolish, but good-hearted patriotic speech is. If a sense of duty drags you watch it, as Martin Luther King Jr. Day did on my part, you might appreciate its good points and learn a valuable thing or two. I will admit that the injustice to LBJ is real, but it is subtle enough that you might have overlooked it if you hadn’t read about it first.
I saw the film in a packed house, around two-thirds black, and I think I heard signs of restlessness in the audience. Now to someone like me, who loves thinking about politics, and who thanks to having read the first two volumes of Taylor Branch’s magisterial King biography is mighty interested in this particular political story, the film ought to have been engaging. But even I was getting bored.
Admittedly, some scenes, such as King’s retreat mentioned above, are done well. King’s speeches are effective, and in a way that is not simply imitative (though Armond White’s point that they are given a more angry and less spiritual tone than the actual ones is probably right). My juices did begin to flow whenever King and co. began to discuss movement strategy. I also would get excited to recognize a lesser figure in the movement like Bayard Rustin or James Bevel when their characters stepped into the scene, but then my frustration would mount as we were taught virtually nothing about them. Some interest is generated in recounting the tensions between SNCC and the SCLC (the former was student-led, the latter was King’s organization), some of the portrait of Martin’s (quiet) marital tensions with Coretta is worthwhile, but overall, the dramatic focus feels either scattered, or muddled when it returns to the main story.
There are many pitfalls a writer faces when trying to frame such a multi-faceted story like this, ones reflected in the wide girth of Branch’s books. My own instinct would have been to tell the story from the angle of another character, perhaps a SNCC activist or a Selma resident, or a lesser SCLC figure like Diane Nash, as King himself might be too reverence-inviting a figure to work with in an interesting way in our time. Admittedly, no matter what you did, you’d be exposed to criticism from some angle or another: You downplayed Ralph Abernathy! You never portrayed the importance of the black church services! The preparatory work by SNCC wasn’t shown! The radicalization brewing within the civil rights movement itself was left out! (All true!) And so on.
But whatever their inevitable exclusions, Webb and whoever else was involved in the writing simply did not produce the goods. A comparison with what Tony Kushner did with the 13th Amendment story in Lincoln, a story which involved similarly complicated political-moral calculations, and a similarly vast cast of characters, is painfully revealing.
So save your money for purchasing the Branch books instead. The Selma protests are covered by his second and third volumes of the trilogy, Pillar of Fire and At Canaan’s Edge, but I would most of all recommend his first volume, Parting the Waters, which covers the Montgomery bus boycott, the pivotal Birmingham protest campaign, and the multi-faceted origins of the civil rights movement. It is both the most inspiring of the three volumes, and the one where Branch is most focused.
In a coming post I’ll address the historical accuracy issues—the key ones involve doing proper justice to President Johnson, and correctly handling the FBI’s exploitation of King’s marital infidelity. Here’s an overview from Ron Radosh. I’ll conclude this post with three details that further suggest the overall lack of judgment of director Ava DuVernay and other key players:
First, in one of the three marches over the Edmund Pettus Bridge the music used in the background is a non-Dylan version of his “Masters of War.” Didn’t they understand that not only does that song have no direct reference to the civil rights movement, but that it is at bottom hate-indulging in a way antithetical to King’s core witness? A telling error, signifying dull acceptance of conventional liberal wisdom about the 60s.
Second, at the premier, director Ava DuVernay and much of the cast wore “I Can’t Breath” t-shirts, which is understandable, I guess, but far more annoyingly, they indulged in that “hands-up” gesture stemming from long-proven false information about the initial incident at Ferguson. So. They were ready to lend their witness to the misguided equation of the significance of Selma-where the deliberate orchestration of police brutality was for the sake of keeping racist control over voting and the state government–, and the significance of Ferguson–which was made to symbolize the far more disputable instances in our day of deaths-during-arrests due to individual incidents of purported racism. Not that DuVernay and company are alone in suggesting this false equivalence. One of the most depressing moments I had in 2014 was noticing that Isabel Wilkerson, author of the must-read Warmth of Other Suns, was herself endorsing the idea that the Ferguson protests were the Selma of our times. Sigh.
Third, DuVernay in one interview expressed “surprise” over the controversy about the treatment of LBJ. Really? Either the mendacity here, or the ignorance here, is stunning. And, she seemed to think she was answering the charge of injustice committed against Johnson by saying she did not want to follow other movies such as The Help that present whites as “saviors.” Well, it is true-enough that there have been too many such movies. But still, what a cheap piece of race-card-ish conventional wisdom to resort to when up against a serious complaint.
DuVernay, Webb, and some of the others engaged in this project were in over their heads. I don’t present the above three points to suggest that they are malicious persons, but rather, persons with the good-intention of honoring King fatally hampered in doing so by their poor judgment, moral and artistic. The two are always, or almost always, inextricably related. I suspect some persons saw early on that they weren’t making a good film, and were too cowardly, perhaps due to fear of possible recriminations of racism but most likely due to the ordinary fear of confronting those you’re working with, to rescue them from the artistic shame they have now brought upon themselves, a shame that is only going to be made worse by this Oscar controversy. Selma is a weak film, and after the immediate debates stirred up about historical inaccuracies, Oscars, and general Hollywood injustices to blacks have faded, most will come to admit this. King, and the movement he stood for, deserve far better.