The personal and the political are deeply intertwined in Ava DuVernay’s Origin. The writer-director and Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson, adapting the latter’s 2020 nonfiction book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, both dramatize the historical calamities that Wilkerson used to boost her central thesis and tell the story of the book’s genesis and the personal tragedies that challenged and inspired the author. In doing so, DuVernay attempts to combine the empirical approach of her damning documentary on the prison industrial complex, 13th, with the tender intimacy of her 2014 biopic Selma. In spanning continents and centuries, and taking on various modes of address, Origin is equal parts unwieldy and ambitious.
Origin starts off with a harrowing reenactment of the murder of Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost) at the hands of George Zimmerman. It’s a ubiquitous tragedy, making it seem a bit too obvious as a starting point for the film. But rather than being used as mere provocation, it serves as a fascinating catalyst for Wilkerson’s (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) journey to explore, and ultimately challenge, the placement of myriad attitudes and actions under the broad umbrella of racism.
Soon after Martin’s murder, Wilkerson is approached by a newspaper editor, Amari (Blair Underwood), to write about the tragedy and how it catalyzed a mass national movement. But even after hearing the horrific 911 calls from Zimmerman and a concerned neighbor, Wilkerson struggles to see Zimmerman as having been purely motivated by racism. She’s left searching for a larger factor at play that would drive a Latino man to murder a Black child in order to presumably (or perhaps unconsciously) protect a primarily white neighborhood.
It’s a compelling way of reframing a saga that was largely drawn in black and white, and scenes of Wilkerson pushing back against the more widely accepted positions held by Amari, who sees Zimmerman’s motivations as racist in nature, and her mother (Emily Yancy), who, in wishing that Martin would’ve told Zimmerman where he was going, argues, consciously or not, for Black subservience. These exchanges put us in the mindset of a writer beginning to realize that she’s on the cusp of formulating a new theory of American hierarchy. Even more importantly, these moments brim with a nuance and curiosity that’s often lacking in the remainder of the film.
In the wake of Martin’s murder, Wilkerson is met with tragedies of her own, which push her further into exploring the notion that widespread atrocities of human subjugation and extermination are connected not by an undercurrent of racism, but by the implementation of caste systems. As she gradually draws connections between slavery and segregation in the United States, the treatment of Jews in Germany during the Holocaust, and the Dalits, or Untouchables, in India, DuVernay again cuts away to harrowing reenactments of such horrors.
These sequences are undeniably disturbing, and they’re welcome for the way that they abruptly shift away from the film’s biopic rhythms. But as Origin continues to ping pong between conventional biographical portraiture and historical reenactment, it’s hard not to wonder why DuVernay didn’t conceive of the film as a documentary. Its dramatic structure becomes so disjointed that the emotional resonance of Wilkerson’s tumultuous personal journey and of those historic tragedies we see play out on screen yields increasingly diminishing returns.
Furthermore, some of the scenes involving Wilkerson take on an instructive tone that can feel pandering, perhaps as a result of the filmmakers struggling to whittle down complicated ideas into sound bites or brief vignettes. A scene where Wilkerson must deal with a disrespectful plumber (Nick Offerman) wearing a Make America Great Again hat is almost painfully on the nose, while her discussion with two German scholars about their country’s banning of the Nazi symbol and the fact that the Confederate flag remains on a U.S. state flag is so bluntly laid out that it feels like it’s tailor made for a high school history class. Of course, in the midst of the current war against what kinds of history can even be taught in the U.S., it’s understandable why DuVernay feels the need to present these ideas with the utmost directness, though there are times when a sledgehammer is used where a chisel might have been far more effective.
By the time Wilkerson is glimpsed laying out her eight foundational “pillars” of caste on a white board, it’s clear that a lengthy documentary would be needed to explore these ideas with the care and attention to detail they deserve. DuVernay’s attempt to fuse Wilkerson’s theoretical perspective with the emotional resonance of a melodrama is audacious, and it works to make Caste’s ideas more palatable to a mass audience. Thanks to Ellis-Taylor’s unflappable performance, the theories that Wilkerson laid out in her book emerge with an emotional clarity that can be forceful, but the film’s often inelegant, choppy structure also works against that clarity. Aptly or not, Origin is not unlike our complicated nation for feeling at odds with itself.
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