Jon Bernthal and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in Ava DuVernay's Origin. Courtesy of TIFF.
In adapting the nonfiction book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Pulitzer Prizer winner Isabel Wilkerson, Ava DuVernay set out to unpack a complex topic that recontextualizes our conception of race and oppression that spans centuries and societies. It’s no small feat, especially for a book as well-researched and intellectual as Wilkerson’s. How does she tackle something this epic in scale? She shrinks it down to its smallest element: humans. Instead of following the idea, she follows Wilkerson’s journey (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) to understand it — from present-day Florida to the Jim Crow South to late 19th century India. But first, DuVernay wants us to understand Isabelle herself.
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Origin begins in the shadow of the murder of Trayvon Martin (Miles Frost), which DuVernay sensitively recreates through the chilling 911 call that stunned the nation. Like all of us, the story rocks Isabelle who is courted by a former colleague to write an article on the shooting. However, we see that Isabelle’s mind is elsewhere. Her mother (Emily Yancy) makes the decision to move into an assisted-living facility and while Isabelle’s husband Brett (Jon Bernthal) supports her, she feels guilt and regret. In these early scenes, we often see Isabelle framed against the sky (the film’s stunning cinematography is by Matthew J. Lloyd) like she’s floating untethered from the ground. She is at an impasse.
That’s when the unthinkable happens. Losing her husband and mother in quick succession throws Isabelle into grief. Poetically translated onto the screen to helps us understand how an incident with a plumber (Nick Offerman) sporting a “Make American Great Again” hat throws her back into work. Using her grief and anger as a motivator, she’s dives head-first into her work trying to find answers to impossible questions. But that insatiable appetite for knowledge and eye for patterns is nothing short of gripping to watch. Like the greatest journalism movies — Spotlight, All the President’s Men — Origin moves with swiftness driven by an urgency to solve the mystery. However, unlike those movies the mystery is at the very core of our world.
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To help us fully understand Isabelle’s thoughts, we hear excerpts from Caste played over reenactments of three historical threads. In the first, we follow German man August (Finn Wittrock) and Jewish woman Irma (Victoria Pedretti), who defied rule in Nazi-era Germany. From there, we connect with a pair of Black anthropologists (Isha Blacker and Jasmine Cephas-Jones) who after witnessing the rise of the Nazi party in Germany embed themselves in the Jim Crow South to investigate the racial divide. Lastly, in an Eat, Pray, Love-like trip to India, Isabelle uncovers the caste system and subordination of the Dalit people.
Each of these threads weave into a tapestry that form Isabelle’s argument: racism and oppression are not synonymous. Oppression exists with or without race. By analyzing each of these disparate systems of oppression, she supports her argument. Cycling between these asides, scenes from Isabelle’s past, and her present research, Origin pieces together a puzzle of our world and Isabelle’s place in it.
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For some, Origin may come off as pedantic. In communicating Wilkerson’s work for a broad audience, DuVernay over-explains herself. Taken as each individual element, the movie could feel more like an issues documentary than an effective narrative. But taken as a sum of its parts, Origin is a dazzling epic of large ideas and the smallness of those affected by them. Two moments emotionally drive the movie’s real purpose. In one, a small Black boy celebrating a win with his little league team is denied entry to a whites-only pool. Eventually, the lifeguard allows him to enter the pool on the condition he remains on a pool float and doesn’t touch the water. As his white teammates look on with confusion the lifeguard moves the boy around the pool on a float. Like the shots of Isabelle against the cast blue sky, the boy himself is floating in space. Untethered and unable to move unless moved.
The second moment is the movie’s watershed moment — Ellis-Taylor’s most exhilarating moment as an actress. As Isabelle, thousands of miles away in India, speaks on the phone to her ailing cousin and confidant Marion (Niecy Nash-Betts in a stellar supporting turn) she asks her to “cover me.” For me, It invoked “I’ll Cover You,” a song from musical Rent where a character and his lover promise to protect each other. In that emotional conversation on distant two points on the globe, Isabelle finds her grounding. Origin, for all its sweeping thoughts, can be simply distilled to that one very human idea. Connection, to the past or our present, tethers us to our humanity. An experience that is as universal as the connection between two people.
Hey! I’m Karl. You can find me on Twitter here. I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic.
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