Having excelled at both historical drama with Selma and out-and-out documentary with The 13th, Ava DuVernay combines the two disciplines for Origin, a biopic of author Isabel Wilkerson that doesn’t just tell the story of how she wrote her celebrated 2020 book Caste, but dramatizes the findings of the book itself. The result is a film with an impressively wide ambition (covering decades of history across three continents), an ambition that is both its greatest strength and, eventually, most damaging weakness. Sweeping and informative, its more documentary-style sensibilities end up leaving not enough space for the human drama at the centre, resulting in a film of two distinctly uneven halves.
Aunjanue Ellis plays Wilkerson across the writing of the book, from its initial ideas sparked by the racist murder of Trayvon Martin through the loss of both her mother Ruby (Emily Yancy) and husband Brett (Jon Bernthal in another very solid performance) to her eventual trips to Germany and India to hone her research. Wilkerson’s main conceit is that it is caste systems, not just ‘racism’ as Americans understand it, that allow for brutal mass dehumanisation, from the slave trade in America to the Holocaust to the hideous, and ongoing, treatment of the Dalits (aka ‘Untouchables’) in India.
It makes for a story with a very broad canvas, made all the broader by DuVernay’s choice to bring some of the chapters of Wilkerson’s book to life in documentary style re-enactments, showing us brief glimpses of the Middle Passage, the Jim Crow-era Deep South, Nazi meetings, and Dalits forced to clean up raw sewage with their bare hands. These moments can be undeniably affecting, presenting in unsparing detail some of the worst crimes humans have ever committed, but this approach ends up depowering the actual centrepiece story of the film.
Even at nearly 140 minutes, Origin struggles to give enough time to either side of its approach, while the scenes of Wilkerson actually writing the book, despite a decent lead performance from Ellis, are unavoidably kinda dull, as writing generally is on screen. It’s great to see a film with this many ideas bouncing around – and, if you haven’t read Caste yourself, you’re bound to learn something new here – but Origin eventually becomes more of an intellectual exercise than an emotional one. The death of Bernthal’s Brett is an especially notable casualty – the trauma of it informs every decision Wilkerson later makes, but it’s not given enough room to really hit home for the audience.
As a documentary, Origin is pretty damn fantastic, unafraid to tackle big and difficult concepts and enlivening them through high production value re-enactments (one vignette, about the man behind the iconic photo of the single figure refusing to give the Heil at a Nazi rally, even stars Finn Wittrock and Victoria Pedretti, both speaking German). Yet, as the story of Isabel Wilkerson, there’s just not quite enough emotional and dramatic depth to escape just feeling like a framing device for the fascinating academic lecture that really fuels Origin.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 