Cast: David Oyelowo nailed the whole "playing Martin Luther King as a believable person" thing. In an incredibly difficult role, I struggle to find a misstep, which is astounding. Carmen Ejogo is also quite good as King's wife, Coretta. It's another very large cast in which no one else needed a lot of screen time. I quite liked Tom Wilkinson's take on LBJ and Tim Roth played George Wallace exactly as villainously as needed. There's a long list of supporting actors on King's side, including Wendell Pierce, Common, Cuba Gooding Jr, and a lot of actors I don't know the names off (Kind of a "how far have we really come?" realization on my part).
Plot: This isn't a biopic as much as it is a snapshot of one of King's finest moments: arranging a march from Selma, AL to Montgomery for voter rights. It follows King's arrival, his strategizing, his stumbles, and ultimately his success. Often, he is depicted in pop culture in such a deified manner that it's hard to appreciate the reality of what he accomplished. This contextualizes it marvelously.
Elephant in the Room: What about the controversy regarding its accuracy? At some point, people need to shut the hell up. I can't phrase it any better than that. There's been a lot of people, specifically from the LBJ administration, arguing that LBJ's depiction in the movie is unfair, that he was actually working closely with King the whole time. I'm incredibly cynical about politics as it is, so I fully believe that LBJ was more concerned with being an effective president (or his legacy) than solely focusing on the civil rights movement. That sounds much more accurate than him being a secret puppet master for the whole thing. I don't need this movie to be completely accurate either. It's historical fiction, after all. If this whole mess ends up derailing the movie's release and awards contention, that'll be a real shame.
To Sum Things Up:
This is a tough movie to get right. Martin Luther King is perhaps the most admired man of the 20th century. It is hard to try to capture what he did that was so important without becoming sanctimonious about it. Much to my surprise, Selma balances the man with the myth incredibly well and the end result is a powerful movie: an underdog story about the perseverance of a group of people and how they managed to overcome apathy and complacency amidst an unjust system...you know, or something like that that doesn't sound like a blurb from the back of a DVD case. As much as I've grown tired of the one note depictions of the South as full of nothing but racists and Klansmen, I can't find much at fault with the movie as a whole. It's just really good.
Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend
No comments:
Post a Comment