Review: Origin

Origin, the new film from Ava DuVernay, is filmstrip cinema.

Some of you may not be old enough to remember when teachers used to roll in projectors (on loan from the library’s audio/video department!) to screen 16mm films that taught you all about when Lincoln freed the selves or when the pilgrims saved Christmas or some shit like that. But I do, and Origin looks like it was made to play in every middle school that isn’t scared to show students something that resembles critical race theory.

Origin is basically a making-of story of journalist Isabel Wilkerson (co-executive producer Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and her journey to write her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Originally approached by an editor friend (Blair Underwood) to write something on the Trayvon Martin murder, she initially turned down the idea. But she reconsiders it after experiencing some core-shaking deaths in her family.

She gets this idea to tie the Martin murder with the caste systems in India, where the Dalit people (aka the untouchables) are considered the lowest stratum of the castes, and Nazi Germany, which went through – well, you know. This is a journey that has her traveling to India and Germany to get more info. It’s in India where she finds out that Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote an Ebony article about his experiences there. (Ol’ girl couldn’t have gone to her local library to find out about that?) In flashbacks, we see people who broke away from their region’s caste ways, like August Landmesser (Finn Wittrock), a German who refused to be down with Nazis and dated a Jewish woman (Victoria Pedretti); or B. R. Ambedkar (Gaurav J. Pathania), the former untouchable who became a scholar and political leader – and who eventually understood that African-Americans and Dalits had a lot in common.

Origin is shot on 16mm, which makes it look unnervingly like it came straight outta those old reels from the Learning Corporation of America (aka the educational film company that produced many an ABC Afterschool Special.) You can thank Disney for making DuVernay go back to her indie, Sundance-winning roots and take the low-low-low budget route.

A few years ago, the Selma director got with the Mouse Factory for an adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s YA sci-fi fave A Wrinkle in Time, where Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Mindy Kaling starred as a trio of kooky astral travelers who help a young girl (Storm Reid). The $130 million movie only made $132 million and is considered one of Disney’s biggest flops. It’s kinda infuriating that the most heavily flawed movies that studio has recently dropped are unfortunately helmed by women of color who receive the brunt of the blame when it tanks. (The Marvels, anyone?)

The choice in film stock makes Origin appear to be a fuck-you to Hollywood studios who are content with films shot on digital video. But it also makes Origin look like a cheaply-made affair. It almost seems like DuVernay is paying tribute to African American indie legends Charles Burnett and Gordon Parks, Sr., who spent the ‘80s making movies with limited resources by any means necessary. However, for a film that has crane shots and orchestrated crowd scenes of Germans burning books, you wouldn’t expect it to look like a TV movie shot in 1986.

DuVernay does populate the film with a cast full of familiar, competent faces. Jon Bernthal takes a break from aggressive-sumabitch roles to play WIlkerson’s loving, dedicated husband, who helps her move her mother (Emily Yancy) to a retirement facility. Niecy Nash-Bettes pops in here and there as a cousin who gives Wilkerson encouraging words before she comes down with something. Nick Offerman even shows up as a Trump-supporting plumber (yes, he wears a MAGA hat!) who briefly has an illuminating interaction with our heroine. Vera Farmiga, Connie Nielsen, and Audra McDonald also appear to give Wilkerson food for thought that’ll keep her going on her mission.

Perhaps DuVernay wanted to make a movie where the visual ugliness matches the historical ugliness Wilkerson unravels (wait until you hear about the story of future artist Alfred L. Bright going with his little league team for a celebratory swim). However, as someone who has seen a lot of DuVernay’s work and knows what she’s capable of visually (she practically spent the pilot episode of her OWN drama Queen Sugar showing how awesome she is at photographing Black skin), Origin is a well-meaning letdown.