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“Origin,” Ava DuVernay’s bold, ambitious adaptation of the equally bold and ambitious book “Caste,” operates on so many levels at once that the effect is often dizzyingly confusing. But hang in there: Viewers who allow themselves to be taken on this wide-ranging, occasionally digressive journey will emerge not only uplifted, but emotionally drained and somewhat purified.
Former New York Times journalist Isabel Wilkerson published “Caste” in 2020 after the 2012 murder of an unarmed African-American teenager named Trayvon Martin, at a time when traditional “conversations about race” simply didn't seem accurate enough to to contain the undiscovered fear, anger and knee-jerk violence that his death was meant to symbolize. In her book, Wilkerson connected systemic anti-Black racism in America to similar structures around the world and throughout history, drawing a blood-red thread between Jim Crow, Nazi-era beliefs about eugenics and extermination, and centuries-old hierarchies in India the lowest of the low – once called untouchables, now called Dalits – are relegated to the most degrading jobs and social status in the country.
Wilkerson's insights were brilliant and complicated, and bringing them to life on screen is not for the faint of heart: DuVernay wisely didn't give a chatty, illustrated lecture. Instead, she has made Wilkerson the protagonist of a drama that is not just a fascinating intellectual detective hunt, but a universally relatable story about trauma, loss, healing and family.
At the center of this sprawling, sometimes sprawling narrative is Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who plays Wilkerson in a stunning lead performance that asks her to be stoic and unyielding one moment, but tremblingly vulnerable the next. “Origin” begins as Wilkerson cares for her elderly mother and suffers the shockingly sudden loss of another family member; That grief haunts her as she sets out, more than anyone else, to explain why race is not enough to encompass the stories we tell about ourselves and others. This search will take them to Germany, India and the American Midwest; it will also take audiences back to Berlin and the American South in the 1930s.
And it will lead them to a family reunion, where Wilkerson has one of several funny, insightful conversations with her cousin Marion, played with warmth and cackling wit by a radiant Niecy Nash. It will send them to a meeting with real-life Dalit scholar and activist Dhrubo Jyoti, playing himself, as well as a swimming pool in Ohio that was the site of an infamous racial segregation incident. This scene, in which Wilkerson speaks to an eyewitness to these events, resembles a documentary film – a motif that DuVernay uses to impressive effect in “Origin” and that seems to create a new cinematic language in the same way that Wilkerson himself captures and tried to express a new concept.
There are moments when the technology results in a film that feels too big and sprawling to be readable. But DuVernay – here working with a formidable team that includes cinematographer Matthew J. Lloyd and editor Spencer Averick – holds the reins of a story that gains momentum and increasing power as its vignettes and Wilkerson's insights accumulate. A scene with Nick Offerman, playing a plumber helping Wilkerson at her mother's house, becomes a master class in unspoken expression as Wilkerson forces himself to disregard his “Make America Great Again” hat; A sequence that reenacts the death of Trayvon Martin and opens the film is revisited with devastating force. In the most heartbreaking passage of “Origin,” a character played by Audra McDonald recounts how the simple choice of a child’s name can penetrate an otherwise intractable edifice of irrational hatred and dehumanization.
An air of sadness pervades “Origin” – how could it be otherwise, given Wilkerson’s subject matter and the circumstances of her life as she dealt with it? But DuVernay manages to inject exhilaration and moments of genuine joy and humor into an enterprise that pulses with life in all its details and contradictions. A film that transcends genre, “Origin” is big and bold, unruly and completely original. A work of deep emotion and catharsis, it is undoubtedly one of the most powerful films of this season. And as an exercise in using cinema to create something new – something almost indescribable – it more than lives up to its title.
PG-13. In the theaters in the area. Contains thematic material on racism, violence, some disturbing images, profanity and smoking. 135 minutes.
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