Very powerful film - highly recommended!

Rating: 8/10 (31 January 2015)

One of my history teachers once called Martin Luther King the "sacred cow" of the Civil Rights movement – an almost mythological figure. I would go so far as to say that the whole civil rights era has been sanitized to the point where the oppression of African Americans in the Jim Crow South almost doesn't feel real. But Ava DuVernay's Selma brings this era to life again. She succeeds because she does not shy away from the darker side of this era while delivering a riveting and moving picture.
The film begins with Martin Luther King's acceptance speech of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, a sort of ivory tower secluded from the real action. But DuVernay quickly brings us back into the real world by depicting the bombing of an African-American church in Birmingham Alabama where four children were killed. The scene packs a major emotional wallop, giving the audience a sense of the frankly barbaric oppression of African Americans in the Jim Crow South better than any Nobel Prize speech (or history textbook) can convey.
The movie then turns to a woman named Annie Lee Cooper, played by Oprah Winfrey, attempting to register to vote in Selma. The government employee subjects her to a ridiculous quiz on irrelevant facts that everybody would fail. Needless to say, her application is denied.
It is in the face of this brutal violence and the violation of constitutional rights that King asks for the help of President Lyndon Baines Johnson in passing a Voting Rights Act, but Johnson wants to focus on desegregation and poverty. King won't budge on the voting issue and decides to organize a march on Selma Alabama in protest.
From here, Selma focuses on three key relationships in Martin Luther King's life – his relationship with his wife, Coretta, his relationship with Lyndon B. Johnson, and his relationship with civil rights organizations. All of them are rife with complications – his wife is understandably concerned about his safety, LBJ does not want to move as fast as King on voting rights, and King's organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, disagrees amongst themselves and with the student group Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) over tactics and strategy. But they all push forward, and unless you live under a rock, you know the Voting Rights Act eventually passed.
The heart and soul of the movie is King's relationship with the civil rights organizations themselves. From the arguments over tactics and safety to the camaraderie between members, Selma portrays the inner workings of these organizations and the painful struggles they endure. The most harrowing moments are the conflicts between marchers and the police. The authorities were not merciful - they brutally beat men and women indiscriminately. The most moving scene for me was the murder of a black protester named Billie Lee Jackson by the police. Jackson and his family participated in a protest march that the police broke up. Jackson, his wife, and his father try to hide in a restaurant, but the police hunt them down, and during the fight Billie Lee is shot and killed.
This sequence was particularly moving because it integrated the civil rights movement with the aftermath of the Civil War and the shootings of young black kids in the present. King visits Jackson's grandfather Cager Lee in the coroner's office to console him. During their conversation, Cager Lee tells King that he was born in 1882 and his family always said he would be the first in his family to vote. King then delivers a powerful speech at Jackson's funeral, placing responsibility for the youth's death on the white people that support discrimination and the African-Americans that do not join in the movement. The link to the post Civil War era is rather overt with the inclusion of Cager Lee, but you would have to be extremely ignorant of current events to not notice the parallels between the excessive force of the police in the 60's with the excessive force of today's police. Selma's juxtaposition of the civil rights movement between these two eras rightly frames it as part of a struggle that is ongoing rather than finished. That, I think, is its greatest achievement.
The movie has good performances all around. David Oyelowo does a respectable job portraying MLK as a burdened but resolute leader. He has good chemistry with Carmen Ejogo, who plays Coretta Scott King. Tim Roth plays an especially loathsome George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama who famously said "segregation now, segregation forever." I wasn't too enamored with Tom Wilkinson as LBJ – he's a good actor, but he didn't seem like LBJ to me.
The stars of this movie though are the unseen director, Ava DuVernay, and the writer, Paul Webb, who took an often sanitized piece of history and made it seem real to viewers, a very difficult task. I wish DuVernay had been nominated for an Oscar for best director.
DuVernay shows that the Jim Crow south was truly a tyranny on this earth. More importantly, Selma is part of a relatively recent trend in Hollywood to make African Americans the central focus of civil rights stories that are often told through the perspective of white people (The Help, Mississippi Burning, Glory, Ghosts of Mississippi, and plenty more). Selma helps us appreciate the very real dangers that the civil rights movement faced and it helps us respect its participants even more.