Origin: Ava DuVernay Invites Deep Thought with a Profoundly Moving Film

By Karen Gordon

Rating: A-

Led by a beautiful performance by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, writer-director Ava DuVernay’s fact-based Origin is a profoundly moving and humanistic movie that explores a range of complex issues about race and culture through the lens of a woman coping with loss and grief.

The film is inspired by 2020’s nonfiction bestseller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson.

Based on what we learn in the film, Wilkerson’s thesis is that American racism can be understood as a caste system, where societies choose to dehumanize a specific group using laws and propaganda to make the prejudice an accepted belief in the culture. She also believes this is not intractable and can be undone.

Heady stuff, though very much in Duvernay’s wheelhouse. She has explored the issues of race in America in several of her projects, notably the feature film Selma about Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and the TV miniseries When They See Us, about the Central Park five.

DuVernay is clearly interested in the ideas in Wilkerson’s book and could have made a documentary. Instead, she's made an interesting choice: using the book as a jumping-off point for a narrative feature built around a lightly fictionalized version of Wilkerson. The result is a deeply felt personal story that leaves us with much to contemplate.

Wilkerson (Ellis-Taylor) is in a stable, happy marriage to Brett (Jon Bernthal). She’s finished writing her first book and is aiming to take a hiatus to care for her elderly mother (Emily Yancy), when she’s approached by her former editor, Murray (Blair Underwood). He wants her to write about the murder of Trayvon Martin, a young Black man murdered in a Florida suburb while walking home from a grocery store. She turns the job down.

Within a short space of time, Wilkerson’s personal world is ripped apart, when her husband and mother die in the space of a year.

She’s flattened and overwhelmed with grief, unable to function. With the support of her cousin Marion (Niecy Nash-Betts), Wilkerson slowly starts to move back into life in the way she always has. She starts to read and research, beginning with the murder of Trayvon Martin.

Then, Charlottesville and the neo-Nazi march happen, which raises questions for her. As well, she's become intrigued by the writings of a Dalit professor in India. Dalits are the untouchables, the lowest caste in that society, considered subhuman.

Wilkerson feels like there’s something that connects these deep-seated prejudices: American anti-Black racism, hatred of the Jews in Nazi Germany, and the untouchables of India, but she’s still searching for what she calls the “connective tissue.”

With the support of her publisher and agent, Wilkerson travels first to Germany and then to India, talking to experts, historians, and locals. Gradually she starts to find what she feels links: racial, religious, and ethnic hatreds, what drives them, and who benefits from creating hatred towards “the others,” and why the ideas stick.

In between, she is coming home and picking up the pieces in her own life, preparing her mother’s house for sale, and researching and reading about the history of racism in America.

As Wilkerson is researching, DuVernay deftly mixes in dramatic recreations to bring points in history to life, such as Nazi book-burnings, Dalit men cleaning sewage, life in the Jim Crow south.

The film at times can feel like a hybrid between a feature film and a documentary. Conversations with experts and individuals are quiet and conversational. As well, DuVernay has cast some non-actors in various roles, from archivists to, most movingly, an older white man recounting a racist incident he witnessed at age nine that has haunted him for his entire life.

This mix gives the film a quiet, serious, and grounded tone which makes it approachable and human. And although it deals with heavy emotions, grief, and racism, the film itself is not at all heavy going.

There are two threads to Origin. DuVernay wants us to understand the ideas and conclusions that Wilkerson covers in her book. Wilkerson identifies eight pillars that societies use to repress or codify hatred against the other in society.

We follow along as she’s working the ideas out during the writing of the book, using a whiteboard to work stuff out. It adds a pedagogical element to the film, but since this is a movie about big ideas, the sequence makes them easy to follow.

The other thread in the film is Wilkerson’s personal story: an accomplished woman working through incredible grief and finding her way back to life.

A lot of the success of the film rests on Ellis-Taylor who is in almost every scene. Much of what she does in the film is listen and absorb. This isn't a showy role or a performance that draws attention to itself, but rather the opposite. She holds our interest and infuses the film with a sense of compassion.

Origin is aiming to do and say a lot of things. But DuVernay gives us a medium for all those messages. It speaks to the movie's connective tissue, the idea of a common humanity, and a way to rethink and heal from the racist and often deadly world. DuVernay is not telling us what to think but inviting us to think about Wilkerson’s ideas. If we choose.

Origin. Written and directed by Ava DuVernay. Starring Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jon Bernthal, Niecy Nash-Betts. Audra MacDonald, Blair Underwood, and Nick Offerman. In theatres January 19.