In adapting Isabel Wilkerson’s dense and sprawling and brilliant and challenging nonfiction bestseller “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” the writer-director Ava DuVernay made a cinematically pragmatic and inspired choice: She brought the work to vibrant and poignant and resonant life by telling us the story of Wilkerson’s personal journey as she researches and writes the book. The resulting docudrama is one of the most thought-provoking movies in recent years — the kind of film you’ll find impossible to forget, the kind of film you’ll want to discuss and debate with friends and colleagues.
There’s not just food for thought here — there’s an entire banquet of ideas.
“Origin” opens in the year 2012, with a sequence involving a teenager (Myles Frost) buying a few items at a convenience store and walking home while talking to a friend about the silly things you talk about when you’re young and your life is ahead of you. He notices a car following him. Is there cause for alarm? We come to realize this young man is Trayvon Martin, and the driver of the car is self-appointed neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman.
A short while later, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, in a commanding yet empathetic and grounded performance ) is backstage after delivering a speech when she bumps into Amari Selvan (Blair Underwood), her former editor at the New York Times. He pleads with her to write something for him about the murder of Trayvon Martin. Isabel pushes back. She’s interested in writing books now, about going wider and deeper in her explorations.
After listening to the 911 tapes from the tragedy, Wilkerson is profoundly impacted and embarks on a mission to examine the larger, global, historic pattern of oppression in vastly different eras and cultures.
“We call everything racism,” says Wilkerson. Of course, she’s not dismissing the existence of systematic racism, but she’s concerned that the term is losing its meaning, and she’s looking for broader and deeper context.
Writer-director DuVernay, cinematographer Matthew J. Lloyd and editor Spencer Averick weave together a time-jumping series of sequences that chronicle Wilkerson’s grief as she endures three separate losses in relatively rapid succession; her travels to Germany and India to research the book, and certain key historical events that will aid her hypothesis that the horrific and dehumanizing caste system in India has strong parallels to Nazi Germany’s extermination of millions of Jews as well as slavery in America.
In the early 1940s, the Black anthropologists Allison and Elizabeth Davis (Isha Blaaker and Jasmine Cephas-Jones) and their white friends and colleagues Burleigh and Mary Gardner (Matthew Zuk and Hannah Pniewski) go undercover to experience the harsh and brutal realities of the Jim Crow South. In 1936 Germany, a factory worker named August Landmesser (Finn Whitrock) refuses to perform the Nazi salute because he has fallen in love with Irma Eckler (Victoria Pedretti), a Jewish woman. These brief vignettes are rendered in heartbreakingly effective fashion, with all of the actors doing fine work.
From time to time we take a break from the research scenes and the reenactments to follow Wilkerson’s personal life. She and her loving and supportive husband Brett (Jon Bernthal) help her mother Ruby (Emily Yancy, wonderful) move into an assisted-living home, as Wilkerson realizes her time with her mother is near the beginning of the end. Brett dies suddenly, leaving Wilkerson devastated. There’s a great scene in which Isabel attempts to break down the framework of her book to her dear cousin Marion (a scene-stealing Niecy Nash-Betts), but it’s almost too much to bear when we learn Marion, too, is not much longer for this world.
“Origin” is filled with tragedies of nearly unimaginable scope and tragedies that are deeply personal, but it also has its uplifting and lovely moments, as when we see a flashback to the moment Brett and Wilkerson meet, and there’s an instant yet awkward chemistry. That scene carries more authenticity and romance than most entire romcoms. (Nearly every scene pops, even when the messaging is a little heavy-handed, as when Nick Offerman shows up as a plumber in a MAGA hat, and Isabel deftly uses her interviewing skills to get him to open up a little and perhaps realize they share more in common than he’d like to believe.)
At times “Origin” acknowledges some of the criticisms of Wilkerson’s book, e.g., when Connie Nielsen’s German-Jewish friend, Sabine, doesn’t buy Wilkerson’s attempts to connect the “Final Solution” with generations of American slavery. There’s certainly room to question how she draws the connection between the caste system in India and the extermination of Jews by the Nazis and the enslavement of Blacks by white men of social and economic power, but “Origin” also provides more than enough evidence to demonstrate how those comparisons are all too valid.
