Starring: David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo, Tom Wilkinson, Oprah Winfrey, Giovanni Ribisi, Andre Holland, Common, Tim Roth, Dylan Baker, Martin Sheen, Stephen Root, Wendell Pierce, Cuba Gooding Jr, Alessando Nivola
Distributor: StudioCanal
Runtime: 128 mins. Reviewed in Feb 2015
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It is 50 years ago, this year, that Martin Luther King led the march on Selma. And this film is a worthy commemoration.
Martin Luther King, vilified by many during his life, especially by J.Edgar Hoover and the FBI, and losing his life to an assassin in 1968, at the age of 39. After his death, his wife, Coretta, campaigned for the introduction of a public holiday in his honour, something which was eventually achieved and is still celebrated.
Selma is a film that takes us back to 1964 and 1965. Audience knowledge of the 1963 March on Washington and King’s speech of his dream is presupposed. While the film is a portrait of King, it focuses on his racial equality cause, spread by non-violence, his political contacts, his collaboration with other activists, differences from the approach of Malcolm X, the issue of the Selma March. There is also some focus on his relationship with his wife, his infidelities but his love for Coretta, his care for his children, and Coretta’s standing by her husband, especially at Selma.
King and his associates are central to the film as his Coretta. However, the president of the time was Lyndon B. Johnson who inherited the presidency after the death of JFK but who was elected in a landslide in his own right in 1964. A Texan, he met with King and spoke to him by phone, challenged by an equality issue that King was raising: black Americans had the right to vote but, especially in the South, officials, from Governor George Wallace to petty bureaucrats, did their best to make it impossible for the registration to vote to be accepted. This is dramatised in an early scene when a nurse, played significantly and symbolically by Oprah Winfrey, tries to register and is asked how many districts there are in the state, which she answers correctly, but then fails because she cannot name the officials in each of the 67 districts.
King and a group went to Selma, Alabama, to decide whether it was a suitable place to have a march and a demonstration, the attitudes of the locals (shown to be fairly hostile with Confederate flags, spitting and denunciations) and the risk of protest and violence.
The apprehensions were not misplaced. In the first attempt, the troopers stood their ground and confronted the quiet and peaceful marchers, chasing them and brutally bashing them. King made television appeals to the American public who watched the television news of the events. For the next March, people from all over the United States, black and white, especially with religious leaders of all denominations as well as nuns, coming to help and to join in the March. Crucial to the campaign and public opinion was the murder of a Boston Episcopalian priest by local bashing thugs.
Governor George Wallace, his sheriffs and other officials had no time for black Americans, mouthing denunciations, even urging President Johnson to think about the dire and dread consequences if segregation was lifted…
Ultimately, the march did take place and is a satisfying ending to this film, although the drama comes in the preparations, the thwarting of the original march, the police trooper brutality, and the effect on the American public bracket heightened by our seeing excerpts of news coverage of the time edited into this film.
It is interesting to note that four of the central characters are played by British actors. David Oyelowo is a theatre actor from England, of Nigerian background, who played on the London stage, moved to the United States and appeared in the sheriff in Jack Reacher, the rebellious son in The Butler, the fellow-journalist in Paper Boy. He gives a powerful performance, an impersonation of King, yet getting inside King’s character and communicating his mind, his thoughts, his hopes, and his faith, seen significantly as he knelt on the bridge at Selma when the march was held up. He also captures the voice, the modulations, the power of rhetoric in King’s speeches. The film ends with King’s speech at the capital in Montgomery, Alabama.
British Carmen Ejogo plays Coretta King. Tom Wilkinson is Lyndon Johnson and Tim Roth is Governor Wallace. There is an uncredited appearance by Martin Sheen as the judge who presides over the case as to whether the march should go ahead. The rest of the cast is made up of a number of black character actors like Wendell Pierce, Cuba Gooding Jr, Andre Holland and white actors like Giovanni Ribisi and Alessandro Nivola.
This is a very earnest film, some American audiences finding it too preachy – although, for them, that might be an important point. As it is, this is a tribute to Martin Luther King and his achievement in the middle of the 20th century, a heritage that has lasted, despite frequent flareups, riots and injustices towards African Americans.
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