MOVIE REVIEW: SELMA

Movie Title: Selma

Director: Ava DuVernay

Rated: PG-13

Running Time: 128 minutes

Genre: Drama, History

                                                       David Oyelowo


Selma is the story of a movement, which chronicles the tumultuous three-month period in 1965, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led a dangerous campaign to secure equal voting rights. The movie is an origin story of the Selma to Montgomery marches that caused controversy and made it acceptable for black people to vote. Selma stars David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King, Jr., Carmen Ejogo as his wife Coretta Scott King. The movie shows the period that the law was changed so that Black people were allowed to vote, and were encouraged with the false promise of a free mule and 40 acres of land as an apology for being kept as slaves for ages.

In the opening scene of Selma, Oyelowo faces the camera and speaks. “I accept this honor for our lost ones,” he says before interrupting himself with an impatient “That’s not right.” He’s talking about the necktie he’s uncomfortably trying to twist around his neck in preparation for the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies. Afterwards, he called on his wife who came into his room and helped him out with the necktie.

The next scene shows Dr. King being awarded his Nobel Peace Prize, which is immediately followed by an incredible moment of an explosion, killing four young girls.

In that year, there were Southern counties whose entire African-American majority was forcibly excluded from registering to vote; the film dramatizes this in a scene of the fatigued old Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey) submitting to a litany of civic trivia questions from a contemptuous clerk (Clay Chappell). The clerk asked her to “Recite the preamble of the US Constitution and name all 67 Alabama county judges.” Cooper couldn’t do this so the clerk stamped her paper with ‘Denied’.

It was this that prompted, Dr. King to talk President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Winkson) into enforcing the law that black people were allowed to vote not having any burden or impediment.

Afterwards, King and other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SCLC, traveled to Alabama to protest black disenfranchisement at the polls and to push for voter-registration reform.

The movie is at its very best when it gets into the essentials of the SCLC’s arrival in Selma amid colliding factions and forces. Dr. King’s men include well-known names, such as his closest confidant Ralph Abernathy (Colman Domingo), Andrew Young (André Holland), and Hosea Williams (Wendell Pierce).

Eventually these events led to a few arrests and they tried to lead a 54-mile march from Selma to the state capitol, in Montgomery; some involved the blatant murder of black people for which no punishment was ever handed out. Ultimately the march to Montgomery drew a lot of attention from the media and put pressure on the government as planned but a lot of reaction in the form of random beatings in the street of both black and white people.

The march culminates in President Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most significant victories for the civil rights movement and approved of the march without hindrance to the state capitol.

     A scene from the movie

The film also gives a goodly amount of screen time to Coretta Scott King, a ringer for the actual woman. In one scene, Coretta speaks of the “fog of death” that surrounds her husband and her life, of how it exhausts her every minute of every day. She confronts King with her knowledge of his adulteries after being sent a damning FBI audiotape.

At Montgomery, Dr. King said, “We hear them say we will never make it…we hear them say we don’t deserve to be here…. But today we stand as a miracle... We are here and we wont let anybody turn us around… This mighty march would be counted as one of the greatest demonstration in Alabama”.

The movie has several intense disturbing scenes against non-violent protesters when they first tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge out of the city and are assaulted by mounted state troopers wielding whips, bats, weapons, billy clubs wrapped with barbed wire. Others are killed including innocent girls in a church that’s been blown up. There was brief strong language like ‘fuck’ and ‘slut’ in the movie.

Selma is a powerful educational and historical drama.