It is a truth universally acknowledged (or at least it should be by now) that America is a country founded upon — as well as cursed, colonized, and fertilized by — a bedrock of racism that continues to this day. Should you be unable to wrap your head around that in 2024, we’re not sure what to say to you. But to chalk up modern social inequity and state-sanctioned violence against certain communities to being “merely” a racially-biased phenomenon and simply leave it at that is insufficient. There’s something deeper going on behind the hierarchies of oppression and hate.
According to Ava DuVernay’s Origin, this was the thought that went through Isabel Wilkerson’s head, becoming the spark that lit an intellectual three-alarm fire. The first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, she’d made her name as a rigorous reporter with a keen eye toward detailing systematic failings and righting wrongs. Wilkerson’s father was a Tuskegee Airman. The Warmth of Other Suns, her 2010 book on the migration of Black Americans from the South to the North, earned her that year’s National Book Critics’ Circle Award. She’d experienced incredible highs in a profession that could be blinkered at best and bigoted and sexist at worst, and suffered numerous personal tragedies. In short, Wilkerson had all the makings to be the perfect subject for a there-goeth-the-great-woman drama. And she was going to be portrayed onscreen by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, an Oscar-nominated veteran of celebrations centered around the struggles of real-life figures (Ray, King Richard).
Yet DuVernay, a filmmaker who’s nothing if not iconoclastic and daring, isn’t interested in crafting a cinematic version of a Wikipedia page, any more than Wilkerson was intent on solely detailing the state of our fractured nation in her groundbreaking 2021 magnum opus Caste. Watch Origin, and you’ll learn a little about Wilkerson’s past, plus a good deal about her inner conflicts. But you will not find based-on-a-true-story uplift-bait. What this captivating, complicated, and oft-compelling movie gives you is a biopic not of a writer but of a book, from inspiration to publication. Yes, it’s the conduit for a creation myth regarding how Wilkerson came to formulate a thesis on the ways caste systems both inform and dictate legacies of prejudice — you will forever think of this movie whenever you hear her name or read her work. But more than just an origin story for a sociological treatise, DuVernay’s film wants to be a starting point for rethinking race in the 21st century, before we all collectively tumble over a cliff headfirst. (It hits theaters on Jan. 19, after a brief awards-qualifying run last year.)
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