Dramatization of a Defining Moment in American Civil Rights History

Rating: 8/10 (23 August 2016)

In 1964 and 1965 Dr. Martin Luther King (David Oyelowo) became heavily involved in a protest movement in Alabama designed to give all African Americans the vote. As with most of his campaigns, he advocated nonviolent methods, but was often met with violent responses from the white majority, orchestrated by Governor George Wallace (Tim Roth). Dr. King became involved not only with the local community but with President Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), who was intransigent at first, but eventually swayed by force of circumstance into passing a bill removing all restrictions on the African American vote.
Ava DuVernay's film tells a straightforward tale punctuated by memorable individual sequences. At the beginning Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey) enters the courthouse in Selma in a vain attempt to register to vote; she is summarily denied by the white official. Nothing much is actually said but gestures signify everything; the humiliation experienced by Annie Lee set against the arrogance of the official. Later on, in the wake of the first abortive protest mounted by the African American community as they try to cover the fifty or so miles from Selma to the state capital Montgomery, three African Americans enter a diner and pretend to order food, in the vain hope that they will escape the pursuing white state troopers. The troopers enter and summarily beat them senseless, taking the life of Jimmy Lee Jackson (Lakeith Stanfield) in the process.
The film's moral stance is unequivocal; in a world still riddled by institutional racism, the African Americans have a justifiable cause to plead. As performed by Oyelowo, Dr. King comes across as a tenacious personality, unwilling to give up his cause even in the face of overwhelming odds. Every time the President protests his inability to help, Dr. King goads him; we understand from such confrontations just how scared the President actually was of allowing too many concessions to the African American community.
Brilliantly staged, with careful attention to detail, SELMA deserves to be considered a modern classic, marred only slightly by Roth's rather artificial Southern accent as Governor Wallace.