Origin (2024)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Ava DuVernay is at her best with real life stories grappling with social structures and widespread injustices, and she tends to make provocative statements for the present rooted in careful consideration of history. Her most recent film, Origin, was released with little fanfare over a year ago, but I'm so glad to have finally seen it, ambitious and unusual a narrative as it is. Essentially, it's a biopic depicting the life and theories developed by Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste. How do you turn an academic scholar's life and ideas into a narrative? It's a tough question, and I can scarcely think of many that would take on such a task, but DuVernay's screenplay and direction make the case for a brilliant, daring new biographical film subgenre.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Wilkerson enduring a series of personal crises while attempting to fulfill her editor's demands. She needs to get another book out, especially one that could deal with ongoing, increasing crises in the United States. The murder of Trayvon Martin spurs her editor (Blair Underwood) to pressure her to write about the hot topic as he sees her as uniquely capable to speak to a hurting nation. Wilkerson has her trepidations, and she explicitly describes her method as needing to "be inside the story" which will require time. Much like our experience of reading Wilkerson's real life writings or even approaching this dense, multifaceted film will take time and perseverance.

Though it's nominally an "adaptation" of Wilkerson's work Caste, Origin is more accurately a biographical snapshot of Wilkerson's personal life and professional interest in her subject matter at the time of composition than it is a dramatization of her thesis and research itself. Family trials beset her, including tragedies involving her mother (Emily Yancy) and husband (Jon Bernthal) that compel her to rely ever more on herself, her work, and the voice she needs to put to words regarding pain in the world around her. Her tribulations provide valuable insight into her ideas, allowing her to see Martin's murder not as the result of racism on its own, but rather in fact as a much broader, more invisible system at work in the US and around the globe.

Anyone familiar with Wilkerson's work knows what I'm talking about, and if you haven't, I'm not going to summarize it here. Suffice it to say that racism in fact is more a symptom than a problem, and resorting to racism to explain something as phenomenologically pervasive as the murdering of innocent young Black men is in fact a restrictive lens. But, as we all learned back in the day from Reading Rainbow, you shouldn't just take my word for it. Read her material and watch the film. DuVernay's adept screenplay masterfully weaves its way through Wilkerson's main theoretical pillars with aplomb even as it invites and encourages us to learn more on our own. Tying the violent aftermath of American slavery to Nazi war crimes against humanity and the degrading brutality of India's caste system, Wilkerson discovers and presents compelling evidence that ideologically link systemic systems of oppression, despite the naysayers (dramatized in a notable dinner scene, as Connie Nielsen attempts to challenge Ellis-Taylor on her intended scholarship). 

Formally, the film offers as much to compel viewers as it does to instruct and dramatize Wilkerson's work. DuVernay's cinematographer views everything in 16mm film which sidesteps the common pitfall of historical films using contrived lenses or color schemes to indicate alternate settings in time and place. Jumping between examples could make the film lurch uncomfortably, but the filmmakers keep the form consistent, helping us connect the daring thesis on visual terms as well as cerebral. Aurally hushed, the film feels intimate and tactile, like we're poring over historical records in a library alongside our protagonist, providing the scholarly insight room to strike us with awe and the actors room to nail us with pitch-perfect melodrama to help move the story along. Bernthal and Ellis-Taylor are exellent, and Niecy Nash even pops in for a few surprisingly intense and tender scenes as Wilkerson's cousin. One scene stuck out to me as both annoying and dispiritingly obvious -- if you know, you know, but it's when Wilkerson calls a plumber (Nick Offerman) to stop her basement from leaking and he arrives with a MAGA hat proudly on his head -- and I wish the filmmakers had made a more nuanced attempt to feel urgent or relevant. But as a dramatic account of astonishing journalism and the fraught process of crafting contemporary social theory, Origin is as poetic, contemplative, and emotionally and intellectually devastating as any award-bait films in recent memory. Weird, sure, and not always entertaining, but staunchly accessible, brave, and important.