‘Origin’ May Be the Most Important Biopic of a Book Ever Made
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It is a truth universally acknowledged (or at least it should be by now) that America is a country founded upon — as well as cursed, colonized, and fertilized by — a bedrock of racism that continues to this day. Should you be unable to wrap your head around that in 2024, we’re not sure what to say to you. But to chalk up modern social inequity and state-sanctioned violence against certain communities to being “merely” a racially-biased phenomenon and simply leave it at that is insufficient. There’s something deeper going on behind the hierarchies of oppression and hate.
According to Ava DuVernay’s Origin, this was the thought that went through Isabel Wilkerson’s head, becoming the spark that lit an intellectual three-alarm fire. The first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, she’d made her name as a rigorous reporter with a keen eye toward detailing systematic failings and righting wrongs. Wilkerson’s father was a Tuskegee Airman. The Warmth of Other Suns, her 2010 book on the migration of Black Americans from the South to the North, earned her that year’s National Book Critics’ Circle Award. She’d experienced incredible highs in a profession that could be blinkered at best and bigoted and sexist at worst, and suffered numerous personal tragedies. In short, Wilkerson had all the makings to be the perfect subject for a there-goeth-the-great-woman drama. And she was going to be portrayed onscreen by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, an Oscar-nominated veteran of celebrations centered around the struggles of real-life figures (Ray, King Richard).
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Yet DuVernay, a filmmaker who’s nothing if not iconoclastic and daring, isn’t interested in crafting a cinematic version of a Wikipedia page, any more than Wilkerson was intent on solely detailing the state of our fractured nation in her groundbreaking 2021 magnum opus Caste. Watch Origin, and you’ll learn a little about Wilkerson’s past, plus a good deal about her inner conflicts. But you will not find based-on-a-true-story uplift-bait. What this captivating, complicated, and oft-compelling movie gives you is a biopic not of a writer but of a book, from inspiration to publication. Yes, it’s the conduit for a creation myth regarding how Wilkerson came to formulate a thesis on the ways caste systems both inform and dictate legacies of prejudice — you will forever think of this movie whenever you hear her name or read her work. But more than just an origin story for a sociological treatise, DuVernay’s film wants to be a starting point for rethinking race in the 21st century, before we all collectively tumble over a cliff headfirst. (It hits theaters on Jan. 19, after a brief awards-qualifying run last year.)
The first person we see in Origin is not, in fact, Wilkerson — it’s a young Black male talking on the phone and buying snacks at a Shop N’Go. The hoodie gives you a hint as to his identity; the ominous vehicle trailing him on a suburban street more or less confirms it. We soon find out this 17-year-old teen, Trayvon Martin, has been murdered by someone who thought he “look[ed] like he’s up to no good.” When Wilkerson runs into Amari Selvan (Blair Underwood) after a lecture, her old editor asks if she’s heard the recordings of the 911 calls. Would Isabel be interested in writing something on Martin? The author declines. “I don’t write questions,” Wilkerson says. “I write answers.” Besides, she’s on hiatus, and her elderly mother (Emily Yancy) just went into assisted living. That last one irritates her husband, Brett (Jon Bernthal) — he can’t abide using family as a weak excuse to not look at the bigger picture behind such increasingly frequent incidents.
Wilkerson finally does listen late one night, and is naturally haunted by what she hears. For some reason, she starts to think of August Landmesser (Finn Wittrock), a young man in Germany who became a card-carrying member of the National Socialist Party and then found himself falling in love with Irma Eckler (Victoria Pedretti), a Jewish woman. There was also another couple in Berlin around that time as well, Allison and Elizabeth Davis (Isha Blaaker and Jasmine Cephas-Jones) — they were Black anthropologists from America who left right as things were heating up and later teamed up with a white couple to study patterns of social inequity in Natchez, Mississippi. And what about the videos of that Dalit professor in India, who spoke of how the country’s population of “untouchables” are forced to clean sewers for scraps of food?
Wilkerson thinks that all of this is connected. Her book editor (Vera Farmiga) doesn’t quite see it: “Well, that’s the writer’s journey,” she gently notes. (The way that Farmiga imbues that line with equal parts encouragement, patience, and WTF confusion is pitch-perfect.) But she tells her to keep chasing down whatever this is. Grief temporarily interrupts her thought process. Then, after kind counsel from her cousin (Niecy Nash-Betts) and briefly licking her wounds, Wilkerson finds herself in Berlin and Mumbai, talking through things with fellow travelers, taking notes, connecting dots. It can’t just be about the color of one’s skin, she surmises. There’s a scaffolding of social orders around things like Trayvon Martin’s death and other historical injustices. Wilkerson just needs to follow the lines of inquiry until she finds the intersections.
That’s arguably what Origin is really about — tracking down the “how” of it all, more so than the “what” or even the “why.” For DuVernay, the journey is just as insightful and eye-opening as the endgame. Reviewing Caste for The New York Times, Dwight Garner said that the deep dive into hierarchical haves and have-nots hits so hard “because the historian, the sociologist and the reporter are not at war with the essayist and the critic inside [Wilkerson].” The same can be said for the Selma director, who diligently chronicles the author’s quest for unifying theories without warring with her own inner dramatist, empath, and/or creative sound-and-vision artist.
DuVernay can whisk you to Nazi Germany or the segregated “Hospitality State” of yesteryear, inciting rage or plucking heartstrings while collaborators like cinematographer Matthew J. Lloyd and production designer Ina Mayhew do the period-flick rag. She can make you swoon over Bernthal and Ellis-Taylor’s joyous romantic overtures. And she can drop a plumber in a red MAGA cap into the mix and make her point without making him a punchline; she humanizes this “deplorable” so deftly that it almost takes a second to realize it’s Nick Offerman playing him.
Like the book itself, Origin has its share of detours, lyrical asides, big steps backward, and offbeat arias. The movie becomes something like a parallel investigation rather than an attempt to directly translate the tome to the screen, emulating its spiral pattern of moving through history lessons and anecdotal evidence rather than sticking to a straight-and-narrow narrative. You wouldn’t call it a stream-of-consciousness attempt at storytelling, though you can’t accuse it of favoring forward momentum over tangents and familial asides. (The work that kept coming to mind when I watched this was not a Southern melodrama set during Jim Crow or a somber arthouse callback to Kristallnacht, et al., though both eras get channeled through recreations. It was, oddly enough, David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, which is a textbook example of a cineaste taking an “unfilmable” book and opting to make something done in the spirit of the original rather than something literal.)
You need a solid tour guide to successfully navigate such long, winding roads and pivot out of possible dead ends, which is why you can’t underestimate how important Ellis-Taylor is to Origin’s ability to connect with a viewer. She’s already proven to be a formidable screen presence and a performer with a strong sense of precision. Wilkerson is a role that lets her play off-the-charts smart, subtle, bold, heartbroken, curious, and eventually, enlightened. Not that the actor acts like she has the answers any more than the real-life Wilkerson, or her director, or the film itself does. This is a movie that pays tribute to searching for conclusions rather than finding them once and for all, for thinking outside of categories and boxes in search of something more profound. Origin wants to ask questions. And then it prompts not you, but us, to find a collective solution out of the past and the present, so that any sort of future has a chance of being more than a pipe dream.
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