selma br

(******6/10)

Starring: David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo, Common, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Wilkinson, Tim Roth, Andre Holland, Cuba Gooding Jr, Oprah Winfrey, Giovanni Ribisi, Dylan Baker, Wendell Pierce, Stephan James, Martin Sheen, Stephen Root

You know how sometimes you see a painting hanging in a doctor’s office or a diner and you think wow, that’s a pretty nice painting! You realize it’s probably not great art, but then you aren’t an art expert. It’s likely a well crafted, skillful rendering of a paint-by-numbers kit that creates a nice looking, polished work that you might put in your house. But you know it’s not a Van Gogh.

This is Selma, on DVD May 5th from Paramount Home Entertainment. A skillful, well-done paint by numbers recounting of Martin Luther King organizing the march over the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965. It hits all the major bases, opening with King (David Oyelowo) receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1964. This is immediately followed by the KKK bombing of a church in Alabama – an event which, I believe, happened about a full year earlier. But it’s a plot point the film makers chose to include, and chronology isn’t terribly important in the movie’s setup.

The main problem with Selma is that there are very few plot points, it seems, that the film makers chose NOT to include. Which would be okay if the film were an eight-part miniseries. But instead what ends up happening is that we get introduced to dozens of characters, none of whom are terribly interesting characters because there is no time to give them depth or a back story. Carmen Ejogo, as Coretta Scott King, is given the most to do – her scenes with King are quite good, and go beyond just hitting the bases of ‘I got a scary phone call’ or ‘I know you’re cheating’. This allows Oyelowo to also bring some depth to his portrayal of King, and his internal conflict over the decisions he is being asked to make.

But while Oyelowo does a wonderful job of capturing King’s inner turmoil, he doesn’t seem as adept at the one thing that I think about when I think about MLK – his majestic oratory. Oyelowo seems to have studied the cadence, and inflection, of King’s famous speeches, but I never got the powerful rousing feeling I get when I see historical footage of some of the more memorable addresses. Selma ends with King delivering his speech from the steps of the state capitol in Montgomery Alabama. There are a few moments leading up to that finale where black and white footage is interspersed with the actors recreating that historic event. And I couldn’t help but think I would have much preferred if the last ten minutes of Selma had just been the actual footage of the actual march, and the actual audio of the actual speech.

It seems like a lot of people really wanted to be in this picture, because the cast list is impressive. But because the movie moves quickly from event to meeting to conflict to resolution to speech to calculation to decision, none of those great actors – Tom Wilkinson as president Lyndon Johnson, Tim Roth as Alabama governor George Wallace, Stephen Root as one of Wallace’s underlings, Martin Sheen as the district court judge ruling on the demonstrator’s right to march, Cuba Gooding Jr. as famed civil rights lawyer Fred Gray, Stephan James as John Lewis (who, I believe, is still a US congressman today), and Oprah as a woman who was denied the right to vote and then marched with everyone else and punched the sheriff.

But they each get such a brief time to make something of their appearance that their performances are muted (with, perhaps, the exception of James as Lewis, who has a few good scenes where he argues with his partner over King’s tactics). Lyndon Johnson is portrayed as an aggrieved politician trying to do the right thing but slowly – his sole powerful moment could have been the moment he tells George Wallace what he thinks of him – but Wallace hasn’t had time to resonate with us as a truly racist segregationist bad guy, so the moment falls flat and seems out of place. Cuba Gooding and Martin Sheen get one scene together, a brief courtroom battle where King and the demonstrators won the right to march. Then they’re gone.

In the end, Selma is a good movie with good intentions about a terrible time in American history that led to something great – the Voting Rights Act signed into law by Johnson in 1965 that allowed black citizens to vote in the South. But the subject matter is more laudable than the final product. I would much rather have seen a great documentary on the Selma marches.