Origin: Trying to Get Beyond Just Black and White

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MOVIE INFO:

While grappling with tremendous personal tragedy, Isabel sets herself on a path of global investigation and discovery. Despite the colossal scope of her project, she finds beauty and bravery while crafting one of the defining American books of our time

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REVIEW:

Origin is Ava DuVernay’s ambitious adaptation of Caste, former New York Times journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s book that connects systemic (anti-black) racism in America with similarly caste based structures throughout the world.  The more obvious ones, those of India and Nazi Germany, are focused on.  Jews have been history’s outcast for millenniums; the Dalits (formerly called Untouchables) have been on the literal shit end of Hindustan for even longer.  The Dalits are so low on the hierarchy that they’re deemed fit for only the cleaning of public toilets with their bare hands- something the film portrays with excruciating and nauseating detail.  It’s so shocking that it overrides the more familiar horrors of the Middle Passage and the Holocaust scenes.    

Origin starts out with Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor)  trying to understand the death of  Trayvon Martin in 2012.  To her, Martin’s murder could not be explained by simple racism.  Yes, Martin was black, but his killer, George Zimmerman was mixed race too.  Hispanics were also subject to prejudice and violence, she reasoned.  The two had that connection, that commonality that should have allowed for sympathy, but didn’t.  There was more than hatred for race going on, something more ingrained that reflected in Zimmerman’s actions (the real 911 call is heard, mostly unedited) and in the nascent public fear, rage and reactive violence that Martin’s death came to symbolize in the American racial divide. 

The bloody red string was caste-  and Wilkerson saw it everywhere.  She detailed it in Jim Crow laws that became the basis for the Nuremberg legislation to encodify Nazi era eugenic and genocidal theories into a master race belief that justified the estrangement and dehumanization of the Jewish people and other, to them, unpure minorities.  She saw it in the millennium old hierarchies of India that had Dalits at the bottom and Brahmins at the top.

Origin is a detective story that tries to solve and show American prejudice.  The side corpse, exhibit B, may be Martin, but the real death that spurs it all are the close together passings of her husband, who was white, brilliant and wonderfully supportive of her, and Wilkerson’s mother, her inspiration and mentor.  The movie is not just HISTORY but a personal story at its most relatable, most tragic, and healing- a true FAMILY HISTORY.  

Origin is carried by Ellis-Taylor’s performance.  It’s a role that calls for her to be everything at once- stoic and unbending, grief-stricken and yet open hearted, sympathetic always and silent when need be. Grief is the current that flows her to the world’s hurt- to Germany, India,  and back to the American South and Midwest of the 30’s where a group of black and white social scientist conduct undercover research that is eventually published as the definitive study of the American caste system—to a black boy on a pool raft in a public pool, the mvp of his mostly white little league team, being pulled by a white lifeguard and being told constantly never to move or touch the water, less he pollute it with his blackness.  That bit is Origin most stuck in the throat moment, its most damming illustration of American caste.

DuVernay combines narrative and documentary techniques. The historical parts are almost documentary like with their question and answer format, their telling and then showing.  Those scenes have the impact of witness.  The personal gets the standard narrative treatment and they’re among the most effecting DuVernay has ever put on film.  She edits emotionally, not with the hopscotch of memory as a template, but knowledge and insight opening up to other areas for exploration.  It represents the process of journalistic research, note taking, collating it all into a resonant article.

Only the last twenty minutes are unable to be fully synthesized.  It’s as if the constant segregation refuses its desegregation, resists it total integration, and only wants to remain caste.  There is an imbalance between narration and visuals.  When the spoken words are strong the images are weak and almost cliché.  The opposite is true too- strong images  yield only stale words and observations. Origin ends with rousing inspiring language over a montage of noble triumphs seen a hundred times before.  Whether this seeming artistic failure is intentional or not, I have no idea.  I felt sad for what was and what apparently must be- caste.  The parts that came before, I applauded, for their joyful mournfulness.  Perhaps that’s the best are human life will allow?

Origin gets a 3.5/ or a B+.  It’s streaming  on Hulu.

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CREDITS:

Directed by

Ava DuVernay

Written by

Ava DuVernay

Based on

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

Produced by

• Paul Garnes
• Ava DuVernay

Starring

• Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor
• Jon Bernthal
• Vera Farmiga
• Audra McDonald
• Niecy Nash-Betts
• Nick Offerman
• Blair Underwood

Cinematography

Matthew J. Lloyd

Edited by

Spencer Averick

Music by

Kris Bowers

Production

company

ARRAY Filmworks

Distributed by

Neon

Release dates

• September 6, 2023(Venice)
• January 19, 2024(United States)

Running time

141 minutes[1]

Country

United States

Language

English

Budget

$38 million

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