Origin review: Clunky metaphors aside, Ava DuVernay’s film delivers emotional kick and intellectual grist

Ava DuVernay has taken on a considerable challenge here. How do you set about translating a sizeable philosophical tome into a modestly sized feature for a general audience? Most film-makers approaching a book such as Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Lies That Divide Us would turn to documentary. DuVernay, director of the fine true-life drama Selma and the ruthless documentary 13th (not to mention the calamitous Wrinkle in Time), has, instead, settled on a fascinating hybrid that follows Wilkerson as she deals with personal grief and teases out the ideas that will inform Caste.

It is not a wholly successful exercise. The attempts to use her protagonist’s crumbling house as a metaphor for the United States – whether drawn from the book or not – stretch the descriptive powers of the word “clunky”. At its worst, you feel as if a friend is pressing you into the corner of a drinks party to lecture you about this great book they inhaled over the summer. “You’ve got to read it!” But, buoyed by an engaged performance from Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Origin delivers emotional kick and intellectual grist. Even those unconvinced by Wilkerson’s arguments will appreciate the rigour with which she makes them.

[ Origin director Ava DuVernay: ‘There’s pain, there’s fear, there’s injustice’ ]

Just as the seeds of Caste (originally published in the US as Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents) were forming in her brain, Wilkerson suffered two enormous personal losses: those of her middle-aged husband (Jon Bernthal) and her elderly mother (Emily Yancy). She considers the then-recent fatal shooting of the black teenager Trayvon Martin – whose story begins the film – and gets caught up in the notion that US discussions about race could profit from pondering connections to wider divisions throughout the globe. She travels to India and discusses the plight of the Dalit people (sometimes known as “untouchables”) and how Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar – obliquely compared to Martin Luther King – championed their cause after independence. She goes to Germany and learns how, in their persecution of the Jews, the Nazis took grim inspiration from the United States’ treatment of its African-American citizens. We learn about academics Allison and Elizabeth Davis and their researches into racism in the American deep south.

Ellis-Taylor, Oscar-nominated for her performance as Mother of all the Williamses in King Richard, is an enormously empathetic actor with a gift for looking straight through her costar and into the audience’s brain. There are some thankless tasks here. She is too often asked to make the book’s arguments in a manner that feels less than conversational. It doesn’t help that the theories as presented here, though sound, feel less than revolutionary. The notion that racism exists within a matrix of oppressions – involving class, religion and region – will alarm only the most doctrinaire of thinkers (though some such have popped up). Happily, the actor finds a manner that never feels hectoring. If we are attending a lecture, it is being given by the most engaging of teachers.

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Not even her efforts can rescue the scene in which a plumber in a Maga hat (Nick Offerman), summoned as the domestic metaphor bursts a pipe, scowls menacingly at the black lady’s every utterance. They eventually reach understanding over similar bereavements in a fashion that – again, even if mentioned in the source – feels too poundingly on the nose for a grown-up film.

For all its flaws, however, Origin does have power as both didactic treatise and drama of recovery. There is something reassuring being said here about the restorative power of work. You sense the people around Wilkerson yearning for her to take a breath, but the research on Caste clearly helps her move forward – not through grief but with grief as a companion. Better something so odd and ambitious than something wan and halfhearted.

Origin opens in cinemas on Friday, March 8th