Once again (after The Imitation Game), I’m troubled about how to review an historical movie, in this case Selma. Directed by Ava DuVernay and starring David Olelowo as Martin Luther King, the movie is centered around the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965, a point where some civil rights laws were established, but also when not much had really changed. The movie portrays King wrestling with not backing down while also fearing the possibility of serious violence being perpetrated by “elements” in those deep-south states. As history tells us, the march, the opposition to it and the media coverage that surrounded it forced the hand of President Johnson and congress, pressuring them into enacting the Voting Rights law of 1965, sanctioning one of the most basic of civil rights for all Americans. Murder and violence did happen, but the march was completed.
This is a story that lends itself to a lot of high drama. The pitfall of the plot would be to portray the culmination of these events as being “inevitable”, when they were not in 1965. Selma doesn’t do that, but brings viewers right into the core of King’s leadership of the event, trying to keep the various factions among the marchers from breaking up the unity and trying to anticipate just how evil the segregationists would get before all this was over. King is shown trying to balance personal, family and movement needs, trying to maintain his leadership while dealing with his personal fears. King meets with the President, deals with media and keeps his movement in line until the march (which took a long time) was complete.
Did all of this make a good movie? I’m mixed about it. I thought David Olelowo was good (but not great) as King, as was Carmen Ejogo as his perpetually worried wife, Corretta. Other members of King’s team were serviceable, but not memorable. What bothered me, however, was some of the other cast members, mainly British actors, in the white roles, mainly Lyndon Johnson and George Wallace. Generally, I really like Tom Wilkinson (Lyndon Johnson), but generally he’s playing a British character, not a surly, accented Texan like Lyndon Johnson. I didn’t think he nailed Johnson at all. He didn’t capture the essence of Johnson, a hard-core political mover and reformed southern redneck who ended up having one of the most progressive political records in American history, while being brought down by his inability to sell the war in Vietnam. I also had the same reaction to Tim Roth, another Brit that I generally like as a villain, this time playing Alabama governor George Wallace. Wallace, when mouthing off about the evils of civil rights, had one of the most sneering and despicable deliveries of any politician and Roth really did NOT capture this, nor his accent. Dylan Baker, playing J Edgar Hoover, trying to use the FBI to ruin King, was completely ineffective as a character. They and other characters were really just flat.
The movie kept a fairly reverent (but not excessive) tone toward King and didn’t spend much time on the accusations of personal shortcomings by King. It focused on the movement he led, didn’t resort to premonitions of King’s eventual fate, mostly, sorta succeeded, but left me feeling like it could have been much more. On a zero to five scale, it’s a 3.5 for me…a decent attempt at portraying an iconic historic character but something less than a triumph.
