Origin
An inquisitive filmmaker, Ava DuVernay likes to interrogate social structures and collective sorrow. Her latest film, a sprawling investigative epic called “Origin,” has one scene that blends all of her interests with all of her rigor. Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis), fresh off a sold-out public talk for her book The Warmth of Other Suns, bumps into her dogged editor Amari (Blair Underwood) backstage. It is only partly in jest when he asks her to write about Trayvon Martin’s death which is happening at the same time as this playthrough since she’s still immersed in producing it. “You have a stable of writers,” Isabel playfully balks. “They don’t have Pulitzer Prizes,” he coolly counters. But she does have a good reason for not jumping in: “I want to be in the story, really inside the story,” she says. “And yes, that takes time.”
This is also the methodological ethos of DuVernay’s career; it is also why watching “Origin” feels so much like labor. In this sense and hers every scene is emotional.
But this adaptation of journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s nonfiction work Caste. The Origins of Our Discontents isn’t an obligation for DuVernay, it’s not something she had to do or felt compelled to do because of who Isabel Wilkerson is or what Caste signifies within American culture or where we are right now, politically and socially speaking, with regard to race relations (or any other hot button issue). She wanted this job; she chased it down like a ghost.
Isabel and Brett (Jon Bernthal) are an ideal couple, comfortable in each other’s habits and sympathetic to each other’s needs especially those needs they can manifest together while they’re still pretending these are somebody else’s problems. They start the movie looking for an assisted living home for Isabel’s mother (Emily Yancy). She knows maternal loss is coming; she’s going to need somewhere to put all this extra love.
Her acting career takes a few grave setbacks these are the tragedies that ultimately inspire her to write a book about Martin and while on tour with another play, she is struck by lightning at every performance. So each night after the show, she sits in her hotel room, staring into space until dawn, occasionally writing down something funny or interesting or absurd. This work which will be called I Was Sitting in My Hotel Room Thinking About How I Could’ve Been Home Watching TV will consist of four hundred pages of dialogues between two people who hate themselves and love each other.
But still: What happened to Trayvon Martin?
“Origin” tries to link the violent consequences of American slavery to the horrific crimes of the Holocaust to India’s caste system in a narrative that combines gnawing grief with a cyclical sense of history. Many people do not understand how this works out for Isabel, but she goes to Germany anyway (The Empty Library), and then also to Berlin State Library. During dinner at an outdoor café with gentle music and relaxed red wine, her Jewish German friend Sabine (Connie Nielsen) voices doubts about whether “Final Solution” terminology would have borrowed from American slavery in any kind of direct or even oblique way that could be inferred by anyone without being explained explicitly beforehand. “A framework is not a book, my friends,” says a patronizing Sabine. “She’s trying to connect United States with Germany. But it doesn’t fit.” The camera cuts low; Isabel tries to stay calm; we see her wild eyes as Sabine describes American slavery to this Black woman who should know better than anyone else what this country did during those years when we were still pretending like everything was fine.
The novel that this movie is based on was never published. It was burned down by a white mob in 1921, the same year they destroyed Black Wall Street. White people burn everything down there’s nothing new under the sun. This anger isn’t academic; it’s a tenacity to break assumptions that Ellis-Taylor fully embodies.
Trying to visually translate Isabel’s book is a tricky task one of those things that just seems impossible until you do it, and then it feels like something anybody could’ve done if they’d just seen what you saw. Shooting on film helps with this, the consistency offered by 16mm means that DuVernay doesn’t have to rely on cheap tricks like adding an ugly patina to the photography to indicate changes in decades or clear acetate overlays for titles indicating changes of location or anything else that might make it seem like she doesn’t trust her audience to follow along without her holding their hand every step of the way (which isn’t true). Because whether she jumps from Nazi Germany or Jim Crow South or early 20th century India, DuVernay wants her aesthetic continuity to mirror Isabel’s connective thesis which is why each shot feels like a punch in the stomach (but your stomach likes being punched).
The texture of film also establishes the necessary intimacy required for witnessing. Cinematographer Matthew J. Lloyd loves close ups, he trusts Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor to conjure Isabel’s twisting stream-of-consciousness monologues with nothing more than her eyes and nostrils, he knows there’s no close up closer than inside somebody else’s mind.
On the other side, DuVernay creates silent chances to carve dynamic reflections. These quiet moments can be personal, such as when Isabel remembers meeting her husband Brett. Years ago, he crossed his suburban street humbly to help her with a stubborn white exterminator who he asked to finish the job. Brett knows his own white knighting “Did I just mansplain?” he asks Isabel. “Well, you did ask permission and if you hadn’t,” says a blush Ellis Taylor. “I’d be in white savior mode,” Brett replies. This is flirty text Bernthal, an actor of uncommon soulfulness, has studied, it’s an answer Isabel handsomely accepts.
Isabel’s cousin Marion (a gentle Niecy Nash) gives Isabel acceptance and laughs until she pares her thesis down into simple terms, despite wrestling with her health. Nash’s humor and patience balances out the film’s heady topics. An invigorated Isabel continues researching by going to India to meet Dalit professor Suraj Yengde (as himself), who teaches about the Dalit activist Bhimrao Ambedkar (Gaurav J. Pathania). Though Isabel is there studying the Dalit caste, her application of “caste” isn’t specific to culture rather it’s her lens for examining dehumanization and oppression that have happened across cultures, countries and generations as privileges systemically inherited by a “dominant” class of people.
While these connections made by Isabel can be thrilling to see some scenes lack such elasticity, when her basement starts leaking, for example, she calls a plumber (Nick Offerman) who arrives wearing a red MAGA cap and through her grief convinces him to actually fix it but this sequence feels too didactic and on the nose to be revelatory. That doesn’t mean “Origin” should be dismissed as a lecture-hour, though. At base, “Origin” is a journalistic film. Like all great reporting, it demands that the viewer not look away. So as Isabel continues researching interviewing, reading and writing what we see is a Black woman at work in a profession that cinematically is too often reserved for white people, thus “Origin” becomes a cumulative statement for DuVernay’s cinematic demand of the viewer to bear witness.
The director’s accomplishment is rare in Hollywood black women are usually excluded from the industry before they can build out their filmographies. But from DuVernay’s “I Will Follow” to “When They See Us,” you can see her increased command in intermingling collective ache with imperative action. Here she is meditative, poetic and nearly unfaltering. Importantly, never does the director’s desire erode into degradation porn; in fact the film’s ending swirling, lyrical, tightly constructed summation of Isabel’s argument is a landmark in DuVernay’s visual lexicon. Sometimes too overtly so, “Origin” isn’t perfect movie; but character of truly great film isn’t found in its perfection rather how narrative moves/challenges/hugs heart. Rich thought wise “Origin” dense force masterwork simply put most radical career film by DuVernay ever made.
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