Selma Tells A Bigger Story

If movies can be likened to people — and I plead guilty if not — then you like them despite their faults, as the adage goes, but you love them because of their faults. The historical inaccuracies in Selma, nominated for an Oscar for best picture, can be forgiven. For this film is no more posing as a documentary than, say, Oliver Stone’s take on the presidential assassination in JFK.

If I want to learn the causes of the French and Indian War, I’ll hit the books and the online research tools. But if I want a sense of what it felt like to be there on the raw American frontier in upstate New York in 1756 when a fort got burned, I’ll maybe view Henry Fonda leaping fences in Drums Along the Mohawk. Or if I want to feel the terror of an Indian ambush during this period, I’ll hang out with Daniel Day-Lewis in Last of the Mohicans.

Likewise, Selma is a heart-pumping, dramatic reimagining of the several weeks making up one of the most crucial moments in the civil rights movement’s history: the Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights in 1965 and the police riot on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

The making of that march is the narrative frame for the film, but it’s primarily about the enormous pressures and risks that fell on King’s shoulders. He is movingly portrayed, both in the podium and in the bedroom, by David Oyelowo, as King leverages the increasingly publicized violence against the nonviolent protesters to get Johnson to fast-track a voting rights bill.

Movies with hero protagonists — and MLK is definitely the soft-spoken indispensable man of the film — need antagonists. It’s to the movie’s credit that, whereas Tom Wilkinson’s effective LBJ is the point man, with an able assist from a devilish, wiretapping-mad J. Edgar Hoover, the antagonist that MLK, his organization, and the citizen activists of Selma are up against is a collective: a federal government, a Southern Jim Crow system, and the inertia of history to take it slow even when people, especially black people, are dying in the streets.

It’s a story that is, alas, still relevant today.

Other faults about Selma that I loved: Casting a British actor of Nigerian parentage as MLK. The Southern lilt he delivers takes some getting used to but its very difference, which you soon accept, keeps reminding you that the events portrayed are based on what happened, not a record of it.

Here’s a tough one: The director, Ava DuVernay, was not allowed to use King’s speeches verbatim, and had to rewrite all of them to sound like him, because the family has copyrighted their use.

So the declamations are always a little off, not as stirring as the original. Still, they work, in part because Oyelowo has made pitch-perfect the pacing and the pregnant silences that King used to give additional power to his words.

Here and there characters go very expository. The Selma activist Annie Lee Cooper, played by Oprah Winfrey, bucks up Coretta Scott King in one of the low personal moments for the family that the film is adept at capturing. Yet even Oprah’s speech — that Coretta can rise to the occasion because she has coursing in her system the powerful blood of a great African people who helped give birth to civilization — is believable in its over-the-topness, in no small part because the speaker believes it.

In dealing with well-documented events, artistic license can be taken in creating historical fiction. The test is not whether something is accurate but whether the result is artistic.

Selma passes this test with heart and soul. It’s a very welcome addition to the growing repertoire of films about slavery and its legacy, from 12 Years A Slave to Mississippi Burning. That latter film, which I also loved, might give you the impression that it was only three idealistic and brave young men, including two white kids from New York — Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman — who, along with FBI agents, made the civil rights movement happen all on their own.

Selma tells another story; the ultimate truth is in the collection of them all.