So, here’s something I never saw coming: a movie based on Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. For the uninitiated, that’s a nonfiction book theorizing that societies create castes for “undesirables” in an attempt for one group to control and manipulate another, focusing the work on African Americans in the United States, the “untouchables” in India, and Jews in Nazi Germany. I saw a trailer for this one a couple weeks ago and had no idea what to make of it. The movie looked incredibly ambitious in scope and subject matter, seemed to be adapting what should be an unadabtable book, a fact that should make me pause a bit. Director Ava DuVernay is hit-or-miss for me in that I have seen two of her movies, one for me was a hit (Selma) while the other (A Wrinkle in Time) with its Giant Oprah was definitely a miss. It had that awards bait feel, but it was coming out in January (actually it hit New York and LA before the new year, so not a January release). All I knew for certain was I wanted to see it.
It helped that, even though I don’t often check Rotten Tomatoes before going to a movie, I did this time and saw a certified fresh rating with a critics score of 80% and an audience score of even higher. Scrolling through the review blurbs, the first bad one came from noted contrarian Armond White, but the key words there are “noted contrarian.” So, was Origin any good?
Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) is an author who just published her latest book. She appears to be someone who is used to rubbing elbows with the rich and elite. When a former editor asks her to write about the then-recent murder of Trayvon Martin, Isabel’s initial thought is she isn’t ready to do so. She’s worried about her mother Ruby (Emily Yancy) since she and her husband Brett (Jon Bernthal) have just helped her move into a nursing home, but the recorded 911 calls from George Zimmerman and an anonymous neighbor combined with small things Ruby and Brett said in a conversation stick with Isabel and make her really wonder why things are the way they are for African Americans. After a pair of personal tragedies, Isabel is ready to get back to work. But what she wants to write about is much bigger than just the murder of Trayvon Martin.
Instead, Isabel sees connections between the way African Americans have historically been treated in the United States to the Dalits (untouchables) in India and how the Nazis so quickly made Jews non-citizens while taking cues from American race laws. For Isabel, the problem isn’t race because race is only a factor in one of those three cases. She instead ponders the problem is one of caste and what that means. As the movie plays out, she looks further and further into the caste situation in all three countries as she develops her theory, writes her book, and gets people talking about a big idea that may explain why groups of people remove the humanity from others.
Essentially, DuVernay here isn’t telling the story of Caste. She can’t. There’s no plot there. Not really. Instead, this movie is more of a dramatization of Wilkerson’s writing process interspersed with stories she tells of people who tried to either understand or defy caste in their respective cultures. Meanwhile, she notices how caste, as she understands it, appears everywhere, including in her own family when she notes how only her mother and one cousin (Niecy Nash) ever accepted her white husband. I’m currently only partway through Caste, and a number of the ideas there do make their way into the narrative as Wilkerson needs to explain her ideas to others or listen as things are explained to her. A conversation over dinner in Germany will lead to some of her ideas while finding out how caste in India works is likewise explained to her.
The movie is also interspersed with recreations of historic victims of caste, and there were times during the movie when I wondered if DuVernay was being a little heavy-handed with her depictions, but I always then circled around to the idea that, given the subject matter, she probably had to given what was happening. As it is, with a solid lead performance from Ellis-Taylor, the movie is at its best when it focuses on Wilkerson’s writing process. The more historic moments that inspired her are fine, but they don’t quite integrate well enough with the rest of the movie. DuVernay does some experimental and symbolic filmmaking here, and not always bluntly like how the people Wilkerson depends on the most are the ones who always find her misplaced car keys, but the overall effect of Origin is still a powerful way to relate an idea that whole societies are set up in ways to simply treat groups of people as things that don’t deserve to be seen as the people they clearly are.
Grade: B+
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