‘Origin’ Review: Ava DuVernay and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor Turn Isabel Wilkerson’s ‘Caste’ Into a Tender Love Story
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Ava DuVernay’s return to feature filmmaking doubles as a thematic homecoming. Origin, loosely adapted from Isabel Wilkerson’s tome Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, is, at its core, a deeply sincere story of love and grief.
DuVernay’s interest in animating the inner lives of Black women stretches back to her feature debut, I Will Follow, in which she explored the contours of a young woman’s heartache after the death of her aunt. She built on it with Middle of Nowhere, a remarkable second feature about a nurse confronting her relationship with her incarcerated husband. And although Selma is about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the film complicates Coretta (Carmen Ejogo), positioning her as King’s strategic co-conspirator instead of just a dutiful wife. In all of these films, DuVernay centers the emotional landscape of Black women, reflecting on how interpersonal and structural constrictions shape their behaviors.
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Caste is not an obvious text for adaptation. It’s a meaty, scholarly book, in which Wilkerson uses the notion of caste — the system of dividing society into fixed social groups — as a framework for understanding the persistence of American racism. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist studies segregation in the United States, India’s caste system and Nazi Germany’s plan to eradicate Jewish people to explain how rigid hierarchies are tools for both subjugation and extermination.
To distill Wilkerson’s ideas, DuVernay looks at the personal events that propelled the author to write Caste, shaping Origin as a process film. This intimate vantage point also offers a tender love story — one brought to life by passionate and committed performances from Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Jon Bernthal.
The film opens with Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost) walking to the store while on the phone with a friend. Their banter about breakfast is light and juvenile, reinforcing Martin’s youth before his murder in 2012. DuVernay never shows George Zimmerman, but when Trayvon notices a car following him home, the neighborhood watchman’s presence is felt and a sense of dread blankets the interaction.
DuVernay has a way of building up familiar tragic moments. She almost always chooses to depict the horror of racist violence, communicating that viciousness by leading with scenes of playful tenderness. Here, she ratchets up the tension and then cuts to a scene of Isabel (Ellis-Taylor) caring for her mother, Ruby (Emily Yancy), with the help of her husband, Brett (Bernthal). These abrupt transitions (editing is by Spencer Averick), used sparingly throughout the film, underscore the brutality of everyday life, highlighting the thin line between routine and tragedy.
Origin is organized into discrete threads: the relationship between Isabel and her family; the one between the writer and her work; and representations of Caste’s thesis for a general audience. To fulfill that last mandate, DuVernay has Ellis-Taylor read excerpted passages from Wilkerson’s book over brief dramatizations. There’s the story of August Landmesser (Finn Wittrock), a lone German who refused to salute Hitler because he fell in love with Irma Eckler (Victoria Pedretti), a Jewish woman. There’s the research done by Black anthropologists Allison and Elizabeth Davis (Isha Blaaker and Jasmine Cephas-Jones) and their white colleagues Burleigh and Mary Gardner (Matthew Zuk and Hannah Pniewski) to investigate the racial caste system in the Jim Crow-era South. And then there is Isabel’s present-day, which builds to a trip to India, where she meets with scholars to better understand that country’s caste system.
The film wobbles as it tries to balance these narratives, which struggle to complement each other in a wholly satisfying way. And DuVernay’s screenplay limply addresses key criticisms of Wilkerson’s book, namely how nuance is lost when comparing Jewish extermination, Black enslavement and Dalit subordination in broad strokes. A compelling moment when a character interrogates that framework is extinguished by a too-quick transition to Isabel recounting her frustrations about the encounter.
Other questions surface, too — the most difficult to ignore being how class allegiances might disrupt caste in the United States. Isabel’s conversations about her ideas take place in manifestations of the ivory tower: fancy cocktail parties, awards ceremonies and tastefully decorated publishing offices. Watching her character move in these environments and interact with fawning white editors introduces a tension as old as conversations about racism in the United States: the tug of war between socioeconomic status and skin color as the dominant factor in shaping identity.
Isabel’s relationships with her family and her work form the strongest, most confident layer of Origin. These scenes mix the suspense of journalism films like Spotlight and She Said with the emotional heart of a family drama. Working with cinematographer Matthew Lloyd, DuVernay uses close-ups and low-angle shots to render Isabel a figure composed of equal parts strength and vulnerability. Ellis-Taylor, a truly remarkable actress, works with a quiet intensity, fleshing out a portrait of a Black woman trying to find avenues for her grief. Flashbacks to Brett and Isabel’s courtship humanize their relationship, giving life to a love and a partnership prematurely cut off.
After Brett and her mother die, Isabel finds comfort in her cousin Marion (Niecy Nash-Betts) and throws herself into writing. Her relationship to Marion provides a space in which the bereaved writer can work through the knots of her grief and the challenges of her work. There’s a tenderness there, which DuVernay captures in long-distance phone calls between the two and a heart-to-heart at a family cookout.
Through Isabel’s world travels, during which she interviews people about the impact of caste on their lives, and conversations with her editor, we come to understand how sorrow shapes the book. The process, as with any artistic undertaking, is at once isolating and gratifying. We’ve seen the story of a woman searching for herself after tragedy many times before, but in Origin, DuVernay affectionately makes it her own.
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