Selma - movie review: 'David Oyelowo is tremendous as Martin Luther King'

David Oyelowo stands out as Martin Luther King but the retelling of a key moment in the Civil Rights Movement doesn’t guarantee the movie’s distinction
Heroic: Selma is the first major film about Martin Luther King, played by David Oyelowo
David Sexton14 February 2015

This film about Dr Martin Luther King’s leadership of the marches from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama in 1965, in support of the right to vote, is difficult to review just as a film. In some ways it’s beyond criticism as the first-ever major movie about this heroic campaigner.

It’s also the first big-budget film from the black independent director Ava DuVernay, herself from an Alabama family (although she grew up in Compton), and it was filmed mostly in Alabama in the very places where these historic events took place. The film itself can thus be considered an historic event, a political intervention in its own right, peculiarly timely too after the shooting and subsequent unrest in Ferguson last year — and its comparative snubbing in the Oscar nominations (up for Best Picture but not for director or acting) has caused something close to outrage, as though this were yet another act of racial discrimination.

David Oyelowo, a British actor now resident in LA, who plays King, has some call to complain about being overlooked. “It bothers me because it’s the best-reviewed film of the year … It bothers me because it’s Dr King — one of the most significant human beings in American life, and I want him celebrated,” he has said, again as though the subject matter guarantees the film’s distinction.

It’s more to the point that he is tremendous in the part, much more plausible as an inspired and charismatic leader than Idris Elba was as Mandela, always compelling your attention, delivering the big speeches with real power and authority, without ever simplifying King or giving him too easy a charm. He’s equally moving in the more intimate scenes too, comforting Cager Lee, the grandfather of Jimmie Lee Jackson, killed by the police — “God was the first to cry for your boy” — or owning up, more or less, to his wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo, also British) about his infidelities. But then Oyelowo had evidently prepared deeply for the role — and he stands out as better than the film around him.

Selma avoids the usual lazy arc of a biopic, birth to death, by concentrating on these events in Alabama, occurring over a few weeks in February and March 1965, 10 years after King’s first major civil-rights action, the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, a year after he had received the Nobel Peace Prize. It shows him at his most effective, outmanoeuvring the racist governor George Wallace (Tim Roth at his very nastiest and snarliest) and pushing President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson, enjoying the hickery) into first allowing the march on the state capital and then signing the historic Voting Rights Act that August. You are, of course, always aware that only three years later Dr King will be assassinated at the age of 39 without it being mentioned, other than as his readiness to meet whatever danger looms. “I can’t hide — we can’t hide,” he says.

So this is an effective script, with events being tellingly narrated for us through subtitles in the form of the impersonal FBI surveillance reports maintained on King. Such a strong story, so morally irrefutable, could have been allowed to make its own drama, to speak for itself. But it hasn’t been. Instead, Selma is a film that’s been overwhelmed by its own sense of occasion, turned into a parade, if not a righteousness workout. The discussions King has with his associates are not dialogue but speechifying. In its wish to honour King as he deserves, the film becomes commemorative and even pompous, slow-moving and self-consciously important.

Preparing to make the second march, after the first attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge has been bloodily beaten back by local police and guardsmen, King proclaims: “We must make a massive demonstration of our moral certainty” — and that’s the film’s mission too. Even the extras, in these hugely emotive crowd scenes, seem all too aware that they’re taking part not in a reconstruction of an historic event but an event in its own right in the making of the movie.

Then there’s Oprah Winfrey. Her support as producer made Selma possible — and she also plays Annie Lee Cooper, a real figure in the story. We first see her in a scene where she humbly tries to register to vote and is prevented by an abusive and racist officer who makes impossible demands on her. “Recite the constitution’s preamble!” he commands. She does. “How many county judges in Alabama?” She says how many. “Name them!” he retorts.

Then, in an otherwise determinedly non-violent demonstration outside the courthouse, attempting again to register to vote, she is confronted by Selma’s vile sheriff, Jim Clark. Even his own side knows he’s rotten — “If Jesus and Elvis Presley came and said we need you to treat the niggers nice, Jim Clark would beat the shit out of them and throw them into jail.” Annie Lee Cooper, who was then 54 (and lived to be 100) stands up and heroically decks the sherriff.

Winfrey says she had doubts about the role. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to play her because Sofia in The Color Purple punches out a sherriff and Gloria in The Butler punches out her son. I thought, ‘Am I just doing punching roles?’” She was persuaded “because of the magnitude of the woman and the magnificence of what her courage meant to an entire movement”.

And those are the values applied throughout Selma, valuable in their own way but not necessarily making for great cinema. Being nominated for Best Film seems the right form of recognition, a way of taking into account its historic significance, without claiming too much for its own qualities as a movie.

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