Director Ava DuVernay has turned her gaze to America’s racial injustices throughout her career — including with 2014’s Selma, a handsome and heartfelt period drama on the historic voting rights marches led by MLK and his followers, and again with her Oscar-nominated documentary on the prison-industrial complex, 13th. The source material for her new film Origin, Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 nonfiction book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, could have easily and naturally been adapted as a documentary. With a vast and academic scope that goes beyond boundaries of country and even skin color, Wilkerson’s book attempts to uncover the underlying hierarchies of power and oppression that run through human civilization itself.
Instead, DuVernay takes a unique creative approach, making Wilkerson herself the film’s central character and setting her on an investigative odyssey that weaves the personal and the historic together. The result — a meditative travelogue through history and the soul, shot on multiple continents in just 37 days — is as patchy as it sounds, but the overall tapestry is compelling and vital.
We haven’t seen this clever a solution since Charlie Kaufman wrote himself into his Adaptation script, struggling to adapt Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief to the screen. That’s a somewhat silly comparison, sure, but it speaks to how intriguing this meta-narrative solution is on a fundamental level. DuVernay finds rich humanity in Wilkerson’s personal journey, where the loss of her closest loved ones and the difficult grief that follows set her on a newfound mission to create meaningful work. (See also: this year’s Best Picture nominee American Fiction.) Her thesis comes to her in pieces as she follows its thread through research, conversation and encounters, eventually revealing the underlying mechanisms that link India’s societal hierarchies, the Third Reich and the American institution of slavery in the form of vivid historical flashbacks that are utterly watchable. There’s a Malick-esque lyricism to how these scenes bubble up into the present, like glimpses into the multiverse — important stories lost to time and pivotal characters who need to be seen again so we can know their names. Featuring warm, tactile production design and Matt Lloyd’s spacious cinematography, Origin would have made for a lush and satisfying miniseries.
This season at the movies, from ‘Origin’ and ‘The Taste of Things’ at the Belcourt to ‘Dune: Part Two’ at the megaplexes
It is as impossible to compress the scale of Wilkinson’s thesis into a feature film as it is to neatly sum up the mechanisms of human oppression in the first place. Or is it? DuVernay’s film, made from the hip and from the heart, does the important work of getting the conversation going. What could be written off by some audiences as “homework” turns out to be something of a scrumptious feast, and shouldn’t get lost in the awards-season shuffle. As we deal with great trauma as both individuals and as a species, Origin features an important form of curiosity, examination and honesty.
