Selma (2014)

The film biography is a treacherous endeavor. I can think of a few good biopics: Patton, Lawrence of Arabia, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Ivan the Terrible, Abel Gance's Napoleon, The Last Emperor, Raging Bull, Young Mr. Lincoln, Serpico, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Reds. The greatest film of all time, Citizen Kane, is a biopic.

Of the recent Hollywood biopics, I remember seeing Milk with Sean Penn, and Ali with Will Smith. I passed on Milk, The Iron Lady, Mandela: The Long Walk to Freedom, J. Edgar, The Aviator, and others.

The reception of Selma has been universal acclaim. According to one aggregator, every single review by a "top critic" has been positive, which would suggest that Selma is one of the greatest works of cinematic art ever produced. Undoubtedly, this acclaim is motivated by the unequivocal rightness and moral power of the events and persons depicted--not solely by the merits of the film itself.

Many of the scenes commit the cardinal sin of movie storytelling: the characters are talking only to provide the viewers with information (political background, exposition, informing us what face matches what historical personage). But information is presumably the last thing the moviegoing public wants. Think about how Lawrence of Arabia or Citizen Kane handles exposition: Lawrence is being kept in the dark about the Franco-British objectives in the Middle East, and so much of the film is his education (along with ours) of the complexities he is not introduced to originally. In Citizen Kane, there is the famous "News on the March" newsreel, a tactic that can probably only be used once. The point is that scenes should avoid having characters tell each other things they already know. (Further, scenes should avoid having simple purposes like a checklist: 1. Show that MLK had affairs and was not "perfect." 2. Show that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI had surveillance on MLK. 3. Show that Malcolm X was in Selma for a minute and secretly supported MLK.) It's anti-narrative because the information just sits there; the story doesn't resolve or respond to these scenes.

This approach is dictated by the film's didacticism... but then, what is the message of the film? What do we learn, really, about racism (for instance)? Why did Governor Wallace stake his political career and place in history to oppose voting rights? Why did Johnson stall? Why did the KKK kill white supporters of MLK? The answer to this can only be: there were important, vital stakes in the Jim Crow political dispensation--stakes that these historical actors stood to lose.

But there is no sense of those stakes in the film. Wallace's actions seem arbitrary and unmotivated. LBJ's opposition and turnaround are only sketched in. The result is that white supremacist rule over the south is disentangled from institutional and economic and political privilege and made to seem like a capricious personal misjudgment. (Take by contrast the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Douglas is on the wrong side of history, but his rhetoric and personality are compelling because he has thought through and is able to argue his pro-slavery position as a coherent one. These positions are abominable but they are rooted in real personalities and real concerns. The racists in the film Selma are not real people; this is an enormous mistake.)

Naturally--because the triumph depicted in the film is the abolition of barriers to voting for blacks. If the movie wanted to show OTHER problems (economic exploitation comes to mind), then the film could not show the Selma march as an unequivocal, soaring victory. The picture of racism in the film is dictated not by history, but by the "happy ending".

Unfortunately, by vitiating the motivations and stakes of the Bad Guys, the movie makes nonsense of its narrative structure: a battle of wills. The opposing wills (of Johnson and Wallace) are silly and half-drawn. This saps out most of the suspense.

There is a moment when MLK recalls a long desegregation campaign in Albany, Alabama, which was unsuccessful because the police chief, Laurie Pritchett, patiently waged a war of attrition and de-escalation against MLK's non-violent tactics. Albany was evidently a complicated, stressful, drawn-out, tactical defeat. This to me sounds like a much more interesting movie, because the doubts and debates and frustrations of the SCLC are built into the events themselves: King is not "infallible" in Albany.

In Selma, King is infallible--some weak gestures by the film aside--and this is just not as interesting to watch.