Selma (2/5 Stars)

It’s been awhile since I’ve seen an incompentent movie in a theater. I don’t like seeing incompetent movies. They make me mad. So I do my homework. One tool I have is RottenTomatoes.com, a website that aggregates the film reviews. “Selma” had a 99% rating on RottenTomatoes before I went and saw it. Another tool is the endless slew of awards handed out at the end of each year. “Selma” garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Picture and another for Best Song. That is an odd pairing of nominations. Best Song is generally a bullshit award (because of the lack of movies that have original songs) and Best Picture should in theory be the hardest nomination to get (because every movie is up for it). The newspapers (I read NY Times) went to work in decrying a racially based snub for this movie’s director (Ava Duvernay) and starring actor (David Oyelowo) among others. The evidence: Selma was directed by a black woman and was about a black civil rights leader. What was striking about the dialogue going on in the NYTimes is that emphasis was put on the fact that there are no black actors nominated in any of the top categories this year from “Selma” or any other movie. This allegedly is proof that the Academy has a diversity problem. What did not receive much emphasis is whether the movies or performances were any good. And in not paying any attention to that, people got hurt. And by people, I mean me. I spent an uncomfortable two hours watching this movie when I otherwise wouldn’t have if there had been more of a discussion of the movie’s merits. There is a difference between what I found wrong with “The Imitation Game,” a biopic I felt was competently made but focused on the wrong aspects of the story and “Selma,” which is not competently made period. Is this an affirmative action honoree for Best Picture? Well, not exactly I think, but I will talk about that last. In the meantime here is a list of some things that are wrong with this picture.

Let’s start at the beginning:

Two scenes start this movie that have little to do with Selma, Alabama. One is Martin Luther King, Jr. accepting a Nobel Prize in Sweden. The second is a bombing of a church that kills four little girls. Now, these are important moments in Civil Rights History but the movie shows a confusion of scope by using them to introduce this particular story. What is this movie about? Is it a biopic of MLK in which the Nobel Prize scene would make sense. Is it about the Civil Rights Struggle in general in which a church bombing that does not take place in Selma and does not involve MLK would make sense. Or is it about MLK’s actions in Selma to call attention to vote discrimination and the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (I argue that it is) in which neither of the above scenes would be a relevant introduction. There is a scene about five-ten minutes into this movie in which an old woman (played by Oprah Winfrey, a producer as well) is denied the right to register to vote. Ditch the first two scenes,  open with that, and then stick to Selma (or make an entirely different movie). I will give two examples of great movies that are about the same subject. One is “Ghandi” which is a biographical epic that does a very good job of telling a large story with many people over the lifetime of its main character. The second is “Bloody Sunday” which concerns itself with one day of a civil rights struggle in Northern Ireland. A story with MLK could have gone either way. This movie tried to do both and weighed down by the mass of material it cut corners to the point that neither type of story worked.

The antagonists do not make any sense. Now we all know that Southern white people in the 1960s hate black people. I’m not debating that reality. But for a movie to work, the bad guys need to be explained. Remember the rule of biopics: Would this movie be any good if it were completely fictional? And I suspect it would be utterly confusing and impossible to follow if one did not already know what was going to happen (I did). The reasons why white people hate black people do not have to be persuasive but they do need to be understandable. Leonardo Dicaprio’s phrenology presentation in “Django Unchained” is especially prescient. “In the Heat of the Night” and “Burning Mississippi” both do great jobs of explaining the white characters in it. Or if you really want to understand racism, I mean really understand it from the inside out, watch “Birth of a Nation.” It is all right there. The takeaway from “Selma” is that white people don’t like black people just because they don't. This black/white treatment renders a scene 3/4ths of the way into the movie inexplicable: the appearance of plenty of white people who want to take part in the civil rights march. Who are these white people? Where do they come from? What makes them different from every other white person in the story?

The writer Paul Webb and the Director Ava Duvernay do not do the black characters that much justice either. Like most poorly written movies, there are at the same time too many characters and not enough of them. That is to say that the amount of people milling about without proper introductions or job descriptions make for a confusing mess and at the same time only MLK Jr. is given enough screen time to render an impact. Halfway through the movie Cuba Gooding Jr. starts talking with Martin Sheen about something. I had no idea who they were or how they were involved in the story. In a later scene we see them in a courtroom. Cuba is a lawyer. Martin is a judge. ANYWAY, generally speaking when a movie introduces a character halfway through a movie, they do it by having them meet a character we already know. This gives the two of them the opportunity to shake hands or something and exchange names or whatever. That does not happen in “Selma.” Instead two unknown characters just start talking to each other.

There are also a disconcerting amount of scenes wherein supposedly smart people explain basic things to other supposedly smart people who for some weird reason don't know these basic things. There is one scene where a character (whose name I did not remember) is debating with another person (who I had never seen before) the choice between violent and nonviolent protest. What is astounding is when this takes place: right after the police turned violent on the bridge. The movie makes it seem like the second guy never considered that the police would get ugly and is only thinking of fighting back with violence now. How the hell does a violent police response surprise a grown black man in the South? And would not a scene concerning a discussion of nonviolence vs. violence make more sense before an organized march begins. After all, the whole point of the march is to provoke the police into being violent against non-violent protestors and get the national media to take pictures and report the oppression to the rest of the country thereby turning around popular opinion and pressuring politicians to pass Civil Rights legislation. That is the plan. It is a very good one and MLK Jr. is nothing if not an articulate man. Why did this protestor not know the plan?

Pundits in the NYTimes have made a big deal over how President Lyndon Johnson is portrayed in this movie. Basically he tells MLK Jr. to slow down on Voting Rights so he can implement his War on Poverty. Historians don’t like this because Lyndon Johnson did no such thing. However what is more troubling (as a movie critic) is why it seems the writer made the decision to turn Johnson from a real life ally and into a fictional villain. It seems the writer did it to save himself a big pile of work explaining to the audience how it is that a bill becomes a law. In this movie, the Voting Rights Act becomes a reality once Lyndon Johnson stops stalling and gives a speech to Congress asking them to enact it. It seriously does not get more complex than that. It is a stunning example of political ignorance to suggest that a presidential speech is all that is needed to pass a landmark law. To explain it properly would have not been easy but I submit it was possible and a well-written movie could have done it. Instead we have a movie that may just make people stupider by watching it. 

There are basic problems with editing in some scenes. In one, a conversation between MLK and Johnson is ended with the phrase, “I want you to do something for me.” A scene follows this with Johnson’s aide and an associate of MLK’s. I am now expecting the aide to tell the associate what Johnson wants. Actually the conversation is about something else entirely, a supposed assassination plot. The movie then goes back to MLK and Johnson so Johnson can explain to MLK what he wants. This is called a fake-out and if there is not a good reason for it (I did not see one) it bespeaks incompetence. Another fake-out occured when the editor decided to jump back and forth from a nighttime scene to a daytime scene without immediately explaining that the daytime scene takes place the next day. These are the sorts of things that employ the people at Rifftracks. Now take the big scene, the confrontation on the bridge in Selma. It is an utter mess logistically speaking. Given how fast the horses move and how far we can plainly see them down the bridge in certain wide shots, it makes no sense at all how the movie shows the episode unfolding. It seems that the movie is taking moments from the beginning, middle, and end of the confrontation and mixing them altogether hoping on slow motion action shots to obfuscate the lack of continuity. Even weirder, the scene is narrated IN THE PAST TENSE by an UNINTRODUCED reporter who is not present AT THE SCENE. We later learn that he is narrating into a phone booth after the fact. Who the hell is he? Where was he during the bridge scene? How the fuck does he know what he knows if he wasn’t there? I am getting angry!

Okay I could say more but that is enough for one review. Let’s go back to the previous question: Is this an affirmative action Oscar nomination? Well, not necessarily. The Academy has long had a lack of imagination concerning what kinds of pictures deserve nominations. Notoriously, comedies and blockbusters are always disregarded, whereas inspirational biopics are generally over represented. This year there are four in the Best Picture Race (American Sniper, Selma, Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything). I have only seen two of these (Selma and Imitation Game) but neither deserves to be in the running. It just so happens that it is easier to judge the accuracy of something that has happened (for instance David Oyelowo sounds like MLK Jr.) and it feels right to honor a movie about honorable people (MLK and Alan Turing.) So Affirmative Action, that is certainly not the whole story here. The genre itself is generally subsidized. Who knows, maybe it was Chris Rock that got snubbed. I have not seen “Top Five” but I heard it was very good.

What bothers me most about the storyline of these Oscars is the idea that having all Caucasions automatically makes the choices conservative. The three front-runners are movies by Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel), Richard Linklater (Boyhood), and Alejandero Inarritu (Birdman). These movies are nothing like each other, are especially innovative, and the makers have never won Oscars before. Anderson and Linklater in particular have been around for decades refining their very unique style of movies into truly impressive art that can no longer be ignored. Ava Duvernay on the other hand hasn’t done shit. To say she was snubbed disrespects those that were nominated.