The marketing genius of movies like Selma, the highly praised docudrama about the march in Alabama that triggered the 1965 Voting Rights Act, is that they simultaneously confuse and intimidate critics and audiences by making them feel as though it would be an act of disrespect to speak anything but words of praise for the way they depict life-and-death historical events of great moral moment. In other words, to speak ill of Selma is to risk speaking ill of Selma—to belittle the event’s importance and to demonstrate insensitivity or even unconscious animus toward those who made the enormous sacrifices we are watching on screen.
It is therefore with some trepidation that I must report Selma is actually quite boring. This is a careful, respectful, well-made, intelligent, and serious piece of work, but as a movie it is only intermittently compelling and never manages to overcome the crucial problem of imbuing its central character, Martin Luther King, with full-blooded life. King is not exactly a waxwork deity here—the movie makes a plot point out of his infidelities—but you never get a sense of just how intellectually and politically confident he was, how spirited and improvisatory he and his team were compelled to be under incredibly difficult conditions.
Under the direction of Ava DuVernay, the British actor David Oyelowo gives King the gravity he certainly possessed but adds to it an unfortunate lugubriousness. The movie is reverent toward King, which is understandable, but its reverence creates a dramatic hole at its center. When Oyelowo is called upon to give the audience some sense of King’s astounding personal force, he gets all the gestures and poses right but he falls sadly short in conveying King’s incantatory power and staggeringly magnetic personality.
Selma desperately needs some of what Daniel Day-Lewis and screenwriter Tony Kushner brought to Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln: a way of seeing King fresh. Day-Lewis did that for Lincoln with the unexpectedly light tenor of his voice and a reedy midwestern accent, and Kushner did it by showing the ways in which Lincoln proved to be a canny political player in his pursuit of the 13th Amendment. DuVernay, who reportedly rewrote Paul Webb’s screenplay, treats the months surrounding the Selma march as a dark night of the soul for King; but surely they also constituted a heady moment—a moment in which much of the American story had come to pivot around this amazingly young man, only 36 at the time, who had become one of the two or three most important people in the United States and perhaps the most celebrated. But this real King, the worldly King, is of no interest to DuVernay and her larger project.
Selma wants to offer us something of an overview of the civil rights movement as it sought to force Lyndon Johnson to put voting-rights legislation at the top of his agenda. And when the film leaves King to concentrate on lesser-known figures—from the future congressman John Lewis to the daring Selma nurse Annie Lee Cooper, played rather wonderfully by Oprah Winfrey—it is more effective precisely because it loses its reverence and becomes a richer and more human story. But it also loses its way in the thickets of a movement too complex to be captured in a few minutes of screen time.
King wanted to shame White America into supporting voting rights, and in the movie, President Lyndon Johnson (played unconvincingly by the British actor Tom Wilkinson) serves as the stand-in for the United States. Selma begins with Johnson telling King he has bigger fish to fry than voting-rights legislation in the year 1965, and it effectively concludes with Johnson having learned his lesson from King’s moral example and telling Congress and the nation that it is time for a Voting Rights Act.
This portrayal of Johnson is simplistic, but not without some validity—and it has, of course, triggered classic autonomic responses among Washington’s gray-haired Democratic veterans. Joseph Califano, a key Johnson aide half a century ago, took to the pages of the Washington Post to declare that Johnson was actually the Machiavellian intelligence behind the Selma strategy and that King had actually served as Johnson’s front man. In fact, King was ever a dogged pursuer of his own and his movement’s openly stated goals; Johnson was, in this as in most other aspects of his presidency, spectacularly inconstant and given to radical and highly emotional shifts in temperament and approach. Califano’s assertion is so ludicrous that it almost beggars belief.
In framing the story of the events in and around Selma as a struggle for Johnson’s tarnished soul, and by extension the tarnished soul of the United States, the movie ends up as something of a pageant. Like all pageants, Selma is designed for our moral elevation rather than our entertainment. To be sure, pageants have their place, but it’s usually not on a top-10 list.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
