Origin, the new film by Ava DuVernay, is an adaptation of the nonfiction book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. It is not a straightforward adaptation, a documentary that explores the ideas by the Pulitzer-winning author. Instead, DuVernay makes Wilkerson herself into the film’s hero, so she dramatizes the time of her life when she conceives of the book, then researches it. The act of writing and researching is not inherently cinematic: the act of watching someone interview people, pore over research and grind away at a draft is exactly as boring as watching a student complete their homework. In order to “spice up” her film, DuVernay includes multiple flashbacks to historical episodes that illustrate Wilkerson’s argument, a gambit that does not pay off because she cheapens their significance by not providing enough context to explore them. It is unique – and not in a good way – for a film this boring to also be this insulting.
When we meet Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), she is already an influential writer looking for the subject for her next book. A brief meeting with her editor (Blair Underwood) starts her on the path to finishing Caste: he insists that she listen to the 911 calls that led to Trayvon Martin’s death, then write about them. She obliges, and in the first dubious scene of many, DuVernay recreates Martin’s death in depressing, borderline exploitative detail. From there, DuVernay splits her screenplay into two scenes: flashbacks to important episodes for her thesis, like a romance in the 1930s between the German August Landmesser (Finn Wittrock) and his Jewish girlfriend (Victoria Pedretti), and excerpts from Wilkerson’s personal life. She faces tragedy of her own: her husband Brett (Jon Bernthal) dies unexpectedly, and her cousin Marion (Niecy Nash-Betts) loses a battle with a chronic illness. All these scenes are meant to illustrate an idea: that a caste system, not institutional racism, is the source of inequality and suffering in societies across the world.
Now any halfway decent sociologist, historian or anthropologist has found similar distinctions and patterns in their career. That does not stop Wilkerson, like many popular nonfiction writers before her, from treating established academic theory like a new revelation (there is a cottage industry of these books on The New York Times Bestseller List. Nothing in Origin strikes as particularly revelatory. In fact, her major breakthroughs are when she uncovers notes from a Nazi meeting where high command discussed American racism, and long conversations with Indian academics who critique the caste system. Did you know that Martin Luther King Jr. once visited India and spoke about inequality there? Neither did Wilkerson, but in this telling, DuVernay suggests she deserves credit for finding primary sources that had already made their way into our bedrock of collective scholarship. Like Adam McKay, another deeply smug filmmaker, DuVernay makes the classic mistake of thinking that just because something is new to her, she is also the first one to think it.
It is too generous to say Origin is ambitious. Perhaps it’s closer to folly, the kind of overreach that can only come from someone who does not understand their limits. Wilkerson’s personal story does not have the thrust of a typical plot because most real life – a random assortment of tragedies and triumphs – does not follow the arc that we find in the vast majority of films. Many scenes have a didactic quality, with Wilkerson interrogating people who help her research, or random one-off scenes like a plumber (Nick Offerman) who visits her home, and whose presence is noteworthy only because he happens to wear a MAGA hat. DuVernay fundamentally thinks we are too stupid to follow Wilkerson’s argument, and so the final act includes multiple scenes where Wilkerson writes out her thesis on a whiteboard. Inert and devoid of dramatic structure, the film has no choice but to devolve into a literal lecture.
A mere lecture is not enough to drive home the message, of course, and so the film also includes horrific flashbacks to disturbing vignettes from humanity’s darkest episodes. Where else could you see a film with Nazis slaughtering Jews, slaves packed into ships and Indian Dalits tortured? All this is on display in Origin, since DuVernay fails to realize that this horrific imagery is cruel and offensive when it’s robbed of its historical context. A cinematic Hail Mary, the film hopes that the audience will be moved by disturbing imagery simply because of our innate empathy toward suffering. That may work for some audiences, but anyone who stops to think about what DuVernay is doing – and why – will see the repugnant cynicism underneath her endeavor.
Smug self-satisfaction is an undercurrent to this film, although that is not abundantly clear until we get to the ridiculous final scene. Outside Wilkerson’s house, the subjects of her book gather to stand in silent acknowledgment of her. Not only do we see Trayvon Martin and August Landmesser, but also victims of the Holocaust, the Transatlantic slave trade and Indian Dalits. DuVernay is so fawning of Wilkerson that she thinks these people – or their spirits, anyway – owe her because, finally, her book tells it like it is. If I were Wilkerson, I would be embarrassed by the implication that my book is anything more than a provocative, thoughtful mix of history and nonfiction storytelling. At a minimum, Wilkerson should be angry at DuVernay, who mined her life for tragedy and scholarship with an adaptation that cheapens everything it attempts to depict.
Photo courtesy of NEON
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