Ava DuVernay’s Selma Is Both Intimate and Grand in Scope

Describing Ava DuVernay’s quietly remarkable Selma to a friend, I caught myself referring to the civil-rights era as a historical event, a thing of the past, and then backtracked. The killing of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice at the hands of police officers — not to mention the Supreme Court’s dismantling, in June 2013, of the Voting Rights Act, a quieter yet perhaps more insidious event — all indicate that the civil-rights era is ongoing, because it has to be. Selma, in addition to being a meticulously detailed historical drama, is the right movie for the moment: In telling the story of the three marches — from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama — led by Martin Luther King in 1965 as a protest against restrictions that prevented African-Americans from registering to vote, DuVernay has also opened a window of hope on the present. If change was painful then, we shouldn’t expect it to be easy now.

Change always costs us something, and DuVernay, working from a script by Paul Webb, faces that truth unflinchingly. The film opens with King, played by David Oyelowo, fussing with the ascot he’s supposed to wear to accept the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize; he complains to wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo) that it’s just too pretentious, that his friends back home would mock him for “living high on the hog.” But his mind is really on something much more pressing, and at this point, DuVernay dramatizes a key event that haunts the speech he’s about to give, a tragedy that had occurred a year earlier: A cluster of little girls descends a church stairwell, chattering about the best ways to get straight, beautiful hair. They’re wearing dresses with short, bouffant skirts and gloves with lacy cuffs.

The explosion that kills them is, in the hands of DuVernay and cinematographer Bradford Young, a slow-motion swirl of dust and splinters and shards of glass. The violence of the moment may be too muted for some and too heartstring-plucking for others. But what else could she do with one of the most villainous and godless acts of the last half of the twentieth century? If it knocks the wind out of you, that means you’re still breathing.

With Selma, DuVernay has pulled off a tricky feat, a movie based on historical events that never feels dull or lifeless; it hangs together as a story and not just part of a lesson plan. The movie is at once intimate and grand in scope: An early scene shows Annie Lee Cooper (played by Oprah Winfrey), who would become a voting-rights activist, trying to register in her home county and being turned away, stymied by a blockade of absurd regulations. Another shows King in the Oval Office conferring with Lyndon B. Johnson (played by a superb Tom Wilkinson), urging the president to push forward with the Voting Rights Act. LBJ, having succeeded the previous year in the gargantuan task of pushing the Civil Rights Act through Congress, drags his heels. LBJ eventually ended up on the right side of history, but King had to nudge him toward it.

Selma lays out the challenges faced by organizers and regular citizens alike in planning and executing the marches. On their first attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they’re run down and clubbed by a phalanx of policemen on horseback; the cops descend upon the peaceful marchers, many of them elderly, kicking and beating them with batons. DuVernay proves both discreet and vigorous in her orchestration of violence, emphasizing its horror without beating the audience up.

As King, Oyelowo is the movie’s grave but radiant center. DuVernay isn’t afraid to tangle with some of the thornier issues of King’s legacy: Though he advocated only peaceful protest, he was canny enough to know that provoking his opponents into violence was the surest way to draw attention to the cause. Oyelowo plays King as a man who knew what he was risking every day — not just his own life, but the lives of others. Selma shows King in moments of weakness and triumph, and though it stops well short of portraying him as saintly, he’s still a hero for our time.