Words like “important” and “vital” are thrown around possibly a little too much in film criticism. It’s not that we don’t mean it — it’s just that sometimes we (ok, I) can get a bit excited. And when watching and reviewing good films in real time, it’s impossible to know what is yet to come. Will there be something else that makes that superlative seem silly in retrospect? Often times, yes.
Ava DuVernay’s new film Origin is that something else. It is a powerful and artistic interpretation of an academic book that was anything but an obvious candidate for a narrative feature.
The book in question is Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, in which Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson offers an overriding theory about power and hierarchy and systemic dehumanization in social structures, connecting the Black experience in America to the Dalits of India and Jewish people in Nazi Germany. The New York Times reviewer called it one of the most powerful non-fiction books he’d ever encountered and “the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”
That Caste was appealing to DuVernay, who has made documentaries like 13th, connecting slavery to mass incarceration of Black men, is not surprising. What’s she’s done with it is. Instead of rehashing the facts of the book, DuVernay has turned Caste into an investigative, fictionalized drama in which we follow the character Isabel Wilkerson as she puts the pieces together while her life crumbles.
With an unconventional structure, in which we are often transported to different stories in different times, in the American South, Nazi Germany and early 20th century India, Origin is nonetheless alarmingly effective, a riveting and haunting journey to a kind of enlightenment.
