Review: Origin

By John Corrado

Ava DuVernay’s Origin is an ambitious film that aims to adapt Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s bestselling non-fiction book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents for the screen. It serves as both an exploration of the ideas within Wilkerson’s book, and a dramatization of Isabel’s experiences while writing it.

DuVernay’s film finds Isabel (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) struggling to write a followup to her book The Warmth of Other Suns, while grieving the sudden death of her husband Brett (Jon Bernthal) and mother Ruby (Emily Yancy).

Isabel is initially approached to write a book on the shooting of Trayvon Martin (played by Myles Frost), one of several story strands that DuVernay keeps coming back to in the film. But she has something much larger in scope in mind, wanting to explore systems of oppression from a historical perspective.

The film turns it into a globe-trotting journey of self-discovery as Wilkerson embarks on the process of writing a book that aims to connect segregation in America to the caste system in India, and the murder of Jews in Nazi Germany. Wilkerson’s main argument, at least how it’s presented in the movie, is that everything can’t simply be explained away as racism, but rather as part of a complex caste system. The caste system in India is not built on race, Wilkerson argues, because everybody has the same skin colour, but rather class, with the Dalits (“untouchables”) being put at the bottom of the totem pole.

The film’s structure oscillates between drama, history lesson, academic lecture, and interracial love story between Isabel and her white husband. DuVernay freely mixes re-enactments and flashbacks, cutting back and forth between Isabel’s research, and the personal setbacks and grief she is experiencing in her own life. It’s an approach that is occasionally powerful, but also at times heavy-handed.

At times, Origin is made to feel like a fictionalized documentary, while other times DuVernay works in more lyrical filmmaking touches, heightened by Matthew J. Lloyd’s warm 16mm cinematography. The film is carried by a good performance from Ellis-Taylor (who received an Oscar nomination for King Richard). She does a fine job of handling both the dramatic moments and these quasi-docu scenes where Isabel interviews subjects for her book, pulling together the different pillars of her thesis.

With the sheer number of themes and different story threads, it’s hard to get a handle on everything the film is trying to say. The film’s attempts to draw parallels between the Martin case, American slavery, the Holocaust, and the Dalits in India, is occasionally persuasive, but also done in a way that can feel self-righteous and manipulative (though this is a review of the movie, not an interrogation of the ideas in Wilkerson’s book, which I haven’t read).

One such example is a dinner table conversation with Isabel’s German friend Sabine (Connie Nielsen), who suggests that Wilkerson’s attempts to draw a connection between Germany and the United States are inherently flawed. Sabine argues that the Holocaust was its own unique form of evil compared to slavery because of the different end goals; extermination as opposed to subjugation. DuVernay plays the scene off the pure indignation on Isabel’s face. It’s not meant for thoughtful debate; Sabine, the film suggests, is not just wrong, but perhaps being racist to draw this distinction.

It plays like a dramatic version of the similar dinner table scene between Eddie Murphy and Julia Louis-Dreyfus from the Netflix rom-com You People. “Leave the Jews out of it,” Isabel’s cousin Marion (Niecy Nash-Betts) tells her on the phone later when recounting her anger at the conversation. These moments feel particularly insensitive considering how DuVernay’s film otherwise heavily capitalizes on Nazi and Holocaust imagery to draw strong emotional reactions.

We also get moments of obvious stunt casting, like a brief appearance by Nick Offerman as a plumber wearing a MAGA hat who comes to fix a leak in Isabel’s basement. It’s impossible to tell if this touch is meant to show him as inherently racist, or meant as a deeper commentary on the working class being drawn to Trump and subjugated by the upper classes for it (though the film doesn’t seem nearly clever enough for the latter, so I’d go with the former).

The filmmaking is sometimes stirring, but other times feels too much like a history lesson intended to be shown in classrooms. The challenge with Origin‘s approach to its complex, thorny subject matter is that it ultimately doesn’t really want to explore these ideas further, but rather present them as a series of revelations. There’s a nagging feeling that the film must still operate as palatable drama, breaking its ideas into bite-sized pieces. It’s sometimes thoughtful, but other times feels preachy, including some overbearing uses of music.

At 140 minutes, Origin is a sprawling, at times overreaching work that nonetheless has some moments of impact. The film’s most captivating and moving moment comes through a powerful story involving a young boy and a segregated swimming pool. It’s one of the most deceptively simple moments, but also when the messages of DuVernay and Wilkerson’s thesis comes across most compellingly and clearly.

Film Rating: ★★½ (out of 4)