Selma (David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo, Tom Wilkinson, Giovanni Ribisi, Oprah Winfrey) – Selma, Alabama, was the epicenter of the Battle for Civil Rights in the mid-1960s. It is hard to believe that, 50 years later, race relations is still front and center in American culture. A lot of people thought that Selma was the beginning of the end for racial tensions in America. It wasn’t. But it was a sentinel event.
David Oyelowo (The Butler, Jack Reacher) is spectacular and uncanny as Martin Luther King in one of those limited biopics that focus on a small slice of the astonishing life of the leader of the Civil Rights movement and a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Perfect casting more than makes up for a wordy script that could have bogged down this important film. In the course of the movie, we meet King’s inner circle, comprised of people like Andrew Young (Andre Holland), Ralph Abernathy (Colman Domingo), James Orange (Omar J. Dorsey), John Lewis (Stephan James) and of course, Coretta King (Carmen Ejogo). The actors are largely unknown but the acting is superb. Oyelowo will almost certainly get an Oscar nomination.
The film moves seamlessly, if somewhat incoherently, from Selma to Washington as we witness the interactions of King and President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson). Johnson, portrayed here less sympathetically than history apparently does, is supportive of King and the movement but does not want the Selma confrontation. He doesn’t think Congress or the American South is ready for the Voting Rights Act that King feels is necessary to give African Americans their God-given and Constitutionally-guaranteed rights. In many ways, the movie portrays the King-Johnson battle as bigger than the black/white issues in the Deep South. That is unfortunate. Johnson becomes a convenient excuse when most scholars believe he sacrificed his roots and the future of southern politics to support Civil Rights.
The producers (including Oprah Winfrey); first-time writer Paul Webb; and Director Ava DuVernay, whose only previous movie credit is the film, Middle of Nowhere (which included Oyelowo) have defended their film’s depiction of Johnson as creative license. They don’t pretend that the movie is historically accurate, which is unfortunate because viewers unfamiliar with the civil unrest of the ‘60s will take it as fact. In the same way as JFK ignores facts for the dramatic impact, so does Selma. And I don’t think it had to. The story is already powerful enough.
Nonetheless, Selma is a must-see and a wonderfully acted film.