A- | Martin Luther King Jr organizes a march for voting rights in Selma, Alabama. Directed by Ava Duvernay Starring David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo, and Tom Wilkinson Review by Jon Kissel |
Selma, along with its structural cousin Lincoln, have cracked the biopic code. Take a single event or effort in a historical figure's life and focus only on that. No thematically resonant childhood, no old-age makeup, no single trigger for a lifetime of psychological distress. Just a well-characterized man or woman struggling against entrenched interests for a couple months. Director Ava Duvernay has not only taken Lincoln’s realpolitik approach to the social justice cause, but she’s also sculpted Selma to this end, eschewing clunky scenes in which 6-year-old Martin Luther King is called a racial slur for lived-in scenes of backslapping revelry between MLK and his compatriots over a potluck buffet. Her film makes the great man a recognizable person and not a sainted abstraction, while also constructing a visceral recreation of the march on Selma.
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