Ava DuVernay’s Origin is a fascinating drama, but it should have been a documentary

Ava DuVernay is an experienced drama director who knows how to craft a human story around a crusade idea, without one overwhelming the other. She proved that with 2014 Selmaher biopic about Martin Luther King Jr., in which she focuses on the voting rights marches from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. But DuVernay is also a documentary filmmaker: her fiery Netflix film 13thabout the prison-industrial complex, proved that she doesn’t need the comforting accoutrements of story and character to help her make a powerful point.

These two sides of the director struggle for control Originan ambitious adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s non-fiction bestseller Caste: the origin of our discontent. The film, which chronicles the personal tragedies of Wilkerson’s life as she conceives and researches the book, is an awkward hybrid of these two approaches, neither of which completely succeeds. It’s a drama that wants to be a documentary, and it’s at its best when it’s playing Wilkerson’s fascinating ideas at full throttle.

The film opens with Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, finding herself in a personal no man’s land after the publication of her first book. She is happily married and her husband, Brett (Jon Bernthal), is a practical rock and a smart sounding board for her ideas. But she struggles with the decision to move her mother, Ruby (Emily Yancy), into a nursing home, and she avoids starting a new project. Her editor is eager to get her writing again and suggests she investigate the murder Trayvon Martin. The case evokes something in Wilkerson: a counter-intuitive, almost vulgar urge to look beyond pure racism as an explanation.

The book that eventually appears is Caste, which seeks to recontextualize American racism and the Black American experience as aspects of a caste system—a millennia-old phenomenon of human society that can, and often does, operate completely independently of race. Wilkerson finds connections and similarities between slavery and Jim Crow in the US, the Indian caste system and the subjugation of the Dalit people (formerly known as “untouchables”), and the dehumanization of Jews in Nazi Germany that ended in the Holocaust. Wilkerson’s argument is that racism may be a byproduct or manifestation of a larger, more universal human evil: the stratification of society into separate castes of people considered inferior or superior, inhuman or superhuman, without any rational reason.

This is really interesting, thought-provoking material, and it’s no small wonder that DuVernay (who wrote Origin‘s screenplay) wants to convey these ideas so badly. She does: when it comes to articulating the core concepts of Wilkerson’s book, Origin is clear and convincing, which is perhaps the only measure of success that should matter for a film like this. But while the film serves the book well, it serves its own dramatic story poorly and fails as a film—ironically because DuVernay is so eager to find an accessible, relatable framework for these ideas.

So the public spends most of it Origin watching Ellis-Taylor travel, debate and interview, nodding sagely as she takes notes or frowning in sympathy and sadness. DuVernay finds a dramatic driving force in Wilkerson’s sad personal story: she suffered multiple, devastating losses during her research Caste – but she never successfully finds a connection between these events and the real content of the film, which is Wilkerson’s thesis. (Origin spends a puzzling amount of time with Wilkerson deciding what to do with her mother’s house — puzzling, that is, until this subplot yields a painfully labored metaphor in the film’s final scenes.) With all due respect to both Wilkerson and Ellis -Taylor, giving a dignified performance, the story of “sad writer, lady grieves, has thoughts, writes a good book” may be inspiring, but it seems irrelevant to the ideas she presents.

But occasionally the scenes from Wilkerson’s life crackle with energy, thanks to clever casting. Nick Offerman plays a recalcitrant plumber in a MAGA hat who comes to inspect the mother’s swampy basement. Connie Nielsen plays a Berlin intellectual who refuses to accept any equivalence between slavery and the Holocaust, in the film’s most thought-provoking scene. Audra McDonald is wonderful as Miss Hale, a friend of Wilkerson’s who explains the complex social dynamics of the name “Miss” in a powerful anecdote.

But Origin invariably sparks more interest when it delves into the past to reconstruct some of the historical material Wilkerson uses in her argument. The story of four young anthropologists – two married couples, one white and one black – who secretly settled on opposite sides of the racial divide in 1930s Mississippi to research a groundbreaking book, could be a film in itself can be. And there is an astonishing, devastating scene from a transcript of a Nazi Party meeting in the early 1930s, in which the Nazis study America’s Jim Crow laws as a blueprint for the separation and dehumanization of the Jewish people.

These stories, and the context in which Wilkerson places them, are powerful. The almost comical images of Ellis-Taylor organizing piles of books, writing on a whiteboard and tapping away on a laptop while tying her suitcase together in voiceover only adds value. It’s easy to imagine a documentary version Origin that’s more like that 13th, with the historical reconstructions stitched together through archival footage, talking head interviews, and biographical information about Wilkerson. It could have been just as convincing and much more satisfying and coherent. But the takeaway is exactly the same, and I plan to take action myself: buy a copy of it Caste and read it.

Origin is in theaters now. Check out the film’s website for local listings.