Selma

Selma (2014; dir. Ava DuVernay) features as main characters people who actually lived and who in some cases are still alive.  I lived through and paid much attention to the Civil Rights movements and its leaders.  I know the faces of M. L. King, Ralph David Abernathy, Andrew Young, Hosea Williams, John Lewis, and others.  It was jarring in this film to see these figures played by actors who at best only slightly resembled them.  I often struggled to identify them.  This was a distraction, but not something the film could help.  Eventually I recognized that the actor in overalls was Hosea Williams and that the man with thick-rimmed glasses played Abernathy.  David Oyelowo’s work as King is excellent, and especially in the speeches he made he became a convincing simulacrum of the original.

Selma powerfully depicts the events leading up to and surrounding the march on Selma.  It’s clear, I think, that one of the purposes of the film is to remind viewers of the sacrifices and risks made by the many participants in the movement, and to pay tribute to its leaders.  The movie presents them as heroes, and that is what they were.  But it also portrays them as human beings.

The film’s intelligence is reflected both in the three-dimensional portrayals of King and his wife Coretta and in how it shows King and others in the movement strategically planning the Selma march in order to bring the greatest amount of national attention.  King is shown both as determined and hesitant, and when during the second march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge he pauses and then turns back, he receives much criticism from his supporters.  This moment of apparent retreat is never fully explained.  We hear various people attempt to understand it.  King himself tries to explain it as the result of his concern for the people who might be injured if the gathered police decide to attack.  Most importantly this moment contributes to the humanity and mystery of King as he is portrayed in the film.  He is rightly regarded as a man of moral vision—we see this aspect clearly--but the film also shows him also as a politician and a strategist.  It also shows him as a husband and father.  A short scene in the film alludes to his affairs with women, and to the unhappiness this caused in his marriage to Coretta.  It shows as well his anxieties over the welfare of his family, especially given how his leadership in the movement made him a target for violence.

Several scenes show the brutal abuse of Civil Rights protestors by white Southerners.  The central scene is in the first march on the Pettus bridge, where police and gathered white crowds viciously attached the marchers.  John Lewis’ skull was cracked.  We see several murders and are told about others.  It was painful to watch these scenes and tempting to view them as exaggerations.  However, newsreel footage, photographs, and numerous reports from bystanders and participants make clear that these portrayals of violence and hate are accurate. 

Malcolm X briefly appears in the film.  He played a small role in the events surrounding the Selma march, and his inclusion was probably a gratuitous acknowledgement of a man who was King’s leading critic among African Americans during the early years of the 1960s, and whose activism represented an alternative approach to the nonviolent tactics of King’s strategy for working towards civil rights.

There are historical inaccuracies in the film.  Many of them may be minor, but the portrayal of Lyndon Baines Johnson is a significant misrepresentation.  Johnson was responsible for pushing both the Civil Rights bill and the Voting Rights act of 1965 through Congress.  He was not an opponent of voting rights.  At worst he and King differed over the timing of the bill.  By the time of the events the film portrays, Johnson had already called for a voting rights bill to be drafted.  Recordings and transcripts of public and private conversations and comments make clear his support for the voting rights bill. Selma makes out Johnson to be the opponent who must be convinced by the Selma march of the bill’s necessity.  In fact, Johnson needed no convincing.  Another issue is the omission of the 1964 Freedom Summer project, including the murders in Mississippi of three civil right workers.  Those events together with the efforts of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation to be seated at the 1964 Democratic Convention did as much as the Selma March to galvanize support for the voting rights act and to bring about its passage.[1]

Although these are serious flaws, especially given the focus on a crucial moment in the Civil Rights movement, they do not ruin the film, which is a dramatic, inspiring, and moving tribute to King and other leaders of the movement.

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[1] For various opinions see Elizabeth Drew, “’Selma’ vs. History,” The New York Review of Books, Jan. 8, 2015, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/jan/08/selma-vs-history/; Ann Hornaday, “Film fact-checking is here to stay,” The Washington Post, Jan. 3, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/film-fact-checking-is-here-to-stay-so-lets-agree-on-some-new-rules/2015/01/02/9698f87c-92a6-11e4-ba53-a477d66580ed_story.html; Amy Davidson, “Why ‘Selma’ is More than Fair to L.B.J.,” The New Yorker, Jan. 22, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/selma-fair-l-b-j; Bill Moyer, “Bill Moyers on LBJ and ‘Selma,’” http://billmoyers.com/2015/01/15/bill-moyers-selma-lbj/; Dee Lockett, “How Accurate is Selma?,” Slate, Dec. 24, 2014, http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/12/24/selma_fact_vs_fiction_how_true_ava_duvernay_s_new_movie_is_to_the_1965_marches.html 

 

 

Child of God

James Franco may take the literary texts he has adapted into films too seriously.  His adaptation of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (2013) was interesting and, I thought, an admirable and creative attempt to render the novel into film.  Faulkner’s novel is primarily a series of internal monologues by his characters, fifteen of them.  In the film, Franco uses voiceovers, camera angles, various cinematographic ploys, and split screens to convey the inner lives and the poetic prose of the novel.  To some extent he succeeds in the effort, but to another extent he fails.  While the novel to me is intensely interesting and psychologically immersive, the film at times seems inert and lifeless.  Certain key scenes, most significantly the attempt of the Bundren family to cross a flooded river, fall flat.  But in general I felt the film was an authentic effort to convey intense literary experience in cinematic form.

It’s clear that Franco admires Cormac McCarthy’s 1973 novel Child of God, another novel that largely centers on a character’s internal life.  Franco preserves the essential structure of the novel and relies on voiceover commentary by members of the community where the action occurs to establish the basic focus on Lester Ballard. It has been a while since I read the novel, but my sense is that Franco is doing something different with McCarthy’s novel in the film than he did with Faulkner’s.  While I thought Franco was trying to translate Faulkner’s novel to film, preserving the essential aspects of the narrative, here I think he is using McCarthy’s novel as a source for a film that in some ways tells a different story.  The film is mainly what I want to consider here.  In tone it is significantly different from the novel.  Our sense of the main character is significantly different. We never see him at all in the novel—we hear people talk about him and we see the world from within his head—in the film, we see him constantly.  As often as we see him, as the camera follows him in doing what he does, we never get inside his head (although we may speculate about what’s going on there).  The film’s intensely visual depiction of Lester Ballard portrays him as a physically and mentally defective hillbilly degenerate, the kind of depraved stereotype who creeps up on the cars of necking teenagers on remote country roads we might encounter in folktales and films from the 1950s and 1960s (the story of “the claw” comes to mind—does anyone remember it)?  Lester is an extreme variation on some of the characters who terrorize the Yankee teenagers in 200 Maniacs.  Even though what Ballard does in the novel—kill women, have sex with their bodies, hide their bodies in a cave) is horrendous and depraved, because much of our knowledge of Ballard comes from within his own consciousness, we don’t immediately view him as a monster.  He is, after all, a child of God, and the novel challenges us to see him that way, in addition to seeing him also as an insane killer.  For all that he is, we’re compelled to see cause and effect, and we’re compelled to consider his humanity.  Given its subject, that the novel would make this demand of its reader in itself is remarkable, and one could argue that the novel goes too far in this regard.  Franco’s film doesn’t toy with our views of Ballard.  From the beginning—from how he behaves and talks, to how he holds his jaw, the uneven cast of his eyes, his slurred and often unrecognizable speech, we see him as mentally challenged and as potentially psychopathological from the beginning.    

The pacing of the film is uneven.  Ballard wanders back and forth across Tennessee farmlands, spies on the man who bought his father’s farm, and not all these scenes have a point.  In an early scene, we see Ballard defecate in the woods and then wipe himself with a stick—what’s the point of this other than to suggest his primitive savagery?  I didn’t see the need for this scene at all, by the way.  He goes into a town and buys a red dress for one of his victims and the young girl who waits on him—with his smelly clothes, his dirty and haggard appearance, his inarticulate speech—seems not to think anything is unusual about him.  Does she have customers like him every day?  (Others in the community, especially the sheriff, are very aware of what is unusual about him).

It’s difficult even in McCarthy’s novel to accept the meaning of the title—that Ballard is after all one of God’s children, marginalized, orphaned, abandoned, driven by bad genes and change in the circumstances of his own life and in the changing conditions of his world to become what he becomes.  In the end, perhaps, though we as readers want to maintain a great distance between Ballard and ourselves, though we want to be sure he doesn’t roam free to do what he does, we come to understand something about him.  In Franco’s film this moment doesn’t come—the resolution of the film differs substantially from the resolution of the novel, and as Ballard wanders across an empty field proud of himself for eluding his former captors, what we’re supposed to think or feel—other than confusion and disgust—is just never clear. Ballard remains a monster.

The rollicking bluegrass music that accompanies parts of the film, especially the opening scenes, doesn’t seem appropriate to the content.