There is an extraordinary scene very early in Selma, the Martin Luther King Jr. biopic opening in the Bay area on Friday. Four young girls are walking down the stairs inside their church when one pauses on the landing to tell the others how Mrs. King does her hair. Suddenly, an explosion rips through the wall and wipes the little girl off the screen. Cut to an image of arms and legs and petticoats drifting in slow motion through the smoke. Cut to a shot of the camera backing up as our eyes gradually pick out four bodies scattered among the rubble.
The effect is shocking and brutal. And it confirms the formidable skills of director Ava DuVernay, who was previously best known for her 2012 feature Middle of Nowhere, for which she won the Best Director prize at Sundance — the first African-American woman to do so. Now, with Selma, expect her to achieve more awards milestones, especially around Oscar time.
DuVernay does take her own sweet time letting us get to know King (David Oyelowo)). When first we meet the Nobel Peace Prize winner, he is getting nowhere in persuading President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) to sponsor legislation protecting voters’ rights for African-Americans. That, and the portrayal of his strained marriage to Coretta (the glamorous Carmen Ejogo), unfolds at a very, very leisurely pace.
Oh, but once he gets to Selma, Alabama… From that point on, the tension ramps up, almost surreptitiously it seems, until the moment where the protesters attempt to march across the Edmund Pettus bridge on their way to Montgomery.
What follows is intensely disturbing. Women are beaten by police. Whips are used on fleeing civilians. And Oyelowo, best known as the rebellious son in Lee Daniels’ The Butler, begins to really hit his stride as King. We see both the charisma and humanity of the character, and his sonorous voice handles the famous man’s words (or screenwriter Paul Webb's approximations thereof) with an authority that goes beyond mere mimicry.
In the end, President Johnson tells Alabama Governor George Wallace (a sneering Tim Roth), “I’ll be damned if I let history put me in with the likes of you,” and gets the Voting Rights Act pushed through Congress. But this doesn’t feel like many Hollywood films, which paints the “powerful white man” as savior for the “noble black man.” Instead, in this case King and the followers of his peaceful protest seem to be the empowered ones (indeed, the numerous, not-so-subtle cameo appearances by Oprah Winfrey as Annie Lee Hooker serve as a constant reminder of who’s truly in charge here).
So what we’re left with is a powerful film that shows us, as one character says, “descendants of a mighty people who gave civilization to the world.” Well, that and the four little girls in the rubble.
Let us not ever forget about them.
4 stars out of 5
Rated PG-13. Directed by Ava DuVernay. Starring David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo, Tom Wilkinson, Tim Roth, Giovanni Ribisi, Alessandro Nivola, Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Oprah Winfrey. Opens Friday Jan. 9.
This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2015.