Origin

It’s a heady enough task, just explaining the idea behind the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson's essential 2020 nonfiction book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which explores the commonalities in America’s history of slavery and post-Reconstruction racism, the centuries-long subjugation of Dalits in India, and Nazi Germany’s efforts to exterminate the Jewish people. Now imagine turning that into a narrative film, teasing out a three-act structure, rising and falling action. The nerviness alone is breathtaking. But writer/director Ava DuVernay’s ambition is often, if not always, matched by her artistry.

In a recent Fresh Air interview, DuVernay (Selma, A Wrinkle in Time) explained how she set about adapting Caste into Origin: “All of the parts in the book where my jaw dropped, I put that in the movie.” That’s sound strategy, but crucially, DuVernay also constructs a new scaffolding, by turning Wilkerson herself into a character. Exquisitely portrayed by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (an Oscar nominee for 2021’s King Richard) in a performance rooted in stillness and bone-deep grief, Isabel is the far-flying film’s center of gravity. Rattled by the murder of Trayvon Martin (depicted in the film, one of many instances to flood the viewer with dread) and further unmoored by loss in her personal life, Isabel begins piecing together the idea for her next book. Doing research in Delhi, she’s startled to hear of Martin Luther King Jr.’s own travels there and his feeling of kinship with the “untouchables.” Traveling to Berlin, she’s stunned by evidence the Nazis took inspiration from America’s Jim Crow laws. Trying to synthesize all her research, she struggles to explain the book’s thesis to her cousin Marion, played by the lively Niecy Nash-Betts. Marion is Isabel’s sounding board, and a proxy for the audience, too, when she urges Isabel to de-academicize her writing: “Make it plain.”

Sometimes Origin is rendered too plain. The nature of the project – fictional Isabel’s book and the film itself – requires much dispatching of historical information alongside recaps of very recent history, which can make for ungainly expository writing. (“You heard what happened in Charlottesville,” murmurs a book editor at a gala.) The film moves elegantly through time and place, but there’s no avoiding its episodic nature; some episodes soar, as when an Audra McDonald monologue pulls the camera in like a tractor beam, while others tread water, as when Nick Offerman wanders in as a MAGA-hatted plumber named Dave. A final scene that literalizes the journey Isabel has been on didn’t land for me at all.

DuVernay’s shot choices have sometimes rankled me, how she’ll deviate from the traditional film language we’re all unconsciously fluent in to insert a different angle, one that startles and draws attention to itself. This time I got it: The startlement is the point. It’s a whisper in the ear to wake up, be willing to see the world anew. Elsewhere, she puts the camera ground level and points up – through a trampoline, through a basement window in the ceiling that memorializes a catastrophic book burning rally in the plaza just above (Micah Ullman’s “The Empty Library”). Both instances place us low to the ground, looking skyward. Toward illumination. Origin doesn’t always get there, but the effort is exhilarating. It’s the contact high of an artist really going for it.