"Origin" is Ava DuVernay’s most ambitious movie. So why does it feel so empty?
When thematic defeats dramatic.
It’s been six TV years for Ava DuVernay since her last feature. Mixed results, but anyone with a brand spent the streaming bubble getting paid. 2019’s When They See Us carried on her examination of American injustice. 2022’s One Perfect Shot was the worst thing Film Twitter ever gave us. Her NBC reality series, which I learned about fourteen seconds ago, is no longer on Peacock. Origin returns her to movies, and then some. DuVernay wrote, directed, and produced this expansion of Isabel Wilkerson’s bestselling Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Wilkerson herself, suffering relentless personal loss during long years investigating global systemic oppression. Her research leads to Nazi Germany, the Jim Crow South, modern-day India. The film opens with Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost) on his fatal walk home, then spends the first act mostly focused Isabel’s family life. There is a key scene with a Harvard academic, a key scene with a plumber. The movie’s Isabel is a Black woman seeking new vocabulary for our violent age. “Racism as the primary language to understand everything,” she says, “Is insufficient.”
So: An essay film about hierarchical persecution, opening national scabs to track bad blood everywhere. It’s idea-packed, melodramatic, abstract, repetitive. Good acting, terrible acting, sincere warmth, blah re-enactments. The centuries and continents make Selma’s march seem molecular by comparison. But that thrilling 2014 biopic microscoped history, expanding one event into a detail-rich snapshot of a man, a movement, a country. Origin turns its binoculars the wrong way around. Epochs become cutaways. The time-space crosscuts come off This is Us-y at best, at worst an atrocity mixtape.
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