Category: Civil rights

Belle (2013)


Gugu Mbatha-Raw is the mixed race daughter making waves in society in Amma Asante’s underwhelming pseudo-historical film Belle

Director: Amma Asante

Cast: Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Dido Elizabeth Belle), Tom Wilkinson (William Murray, Lord Mansfield), Sam Reid (John Davinier), Emily Watson (Lady Elizabeth Mansfield), Sarah Gadon (Lady Elizabeth Murray), Miranda Richardson (Lady Ashford), Penelope Wilton (Lady Mary Murray), Tom Felton (James Ashford), James Norton (Oliver Ashford), Matthew Goode (Captain Sir John Lindsay), Alex Jennings (Lord Ashford)

The British film industry produces a constant stream of costume dramas, many covering alarmingly similar ground on the aristocracy or wealthy of the Georgian period onwards. It’s to be commended then that Belle takes a similar plot, but from a radically different direction. Here, a famous real painting of a white and mixed-race pair of ladies becomes the jumping off point for a drama about an illegitimate mixed-race daughter of a wealthy family.

Dido Elizabeth Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is the daughter of naval captain and a slave in the West Indies. After his death, she his raised by her uncle William Murray (Tom Wilkinson), Earl of Mansfield, and his wife (Emily Watson) to raise her as their own alongside their niece Elizabeth (Sarah Gadron). Belle is treated as an equal among the family, but is not allowed to dine with guests or move freely in society. However, Belle has inherited a fortune from her father – unlike Elizabeth – and quickly finds herself a source of interest from the younger sons of the nobility. Meanwhile Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice, is asked to rule on the slave ship Zorg case (where slavers threw their slaves overboard in a storm), a case that brings passionate abolitionist John Davinier (Sam Reid) into Belle’s life and makes her start to re-evaluate society’s attitude to her.

Belle is a formulaic costume drama, given an imaginative twist by placing a black woman at its heart. It explores issues around the imbalanced attitudes of British society at the time (and since), and the hypocrisy and racism that bubbles under the surface of the British gentry. Belle is rejected by all and sundry – until knowledge of her wealth becomes known, at which point many of these objections are choked back to secure her money. The film gets much mileage out of Belle slowly comparing her position first to the black servants around her and then to the slaves who lost their lives on the Zorg.

However, what undermines Belle is that it is a work of fiction – and it feels like it’s hiding it. What we do know about the real Belle (which isn’t much) doesn’t relate at all to what we see in the film. She wasn’t an heiress. She didn’t fall in love with an abolitionist lawyer – Davinier was not the aspiring son of a cleric, but a French steward. Elizabeth probably wasn’t a penniless relative. Mansfield’s credentials as a proto-Abolitionist and reformer were never in doubt – by the time of the Zorg case he had already passed a ruling 10 years earlier that there was no basis for slavery in British law. Belle actually lived in Mansfield’s house until his death as effectively a housekeeper and semi-secretary (the very fate she rejects in the film). The film’s lack of interest in historical fact even affects small details – at one point James Norton’s pleasant but empty Oliver boasts his father has purchased him a commission as a Captain in the Navy, virtually the only institution in Georgian England which promoted solely on merit! (This annoyed me a lot more than it should have.) 

Belle is not a true story by a long stretch – but that doesn’t stop it proclaiming a “what happened next” series of captions at the end. It could have got away with this in a way other non-historical films have, if its story itself was more compelling. But instead Belle offers a merely serviceable story, offering a unique prospective on the aristocracy but largely using it to tell a fairly conventional “love across the social divide” story. Honestly, for large chunks of the film you could replace Belle with any slightly shameful second daughter, and the story would remain largely the same.

Which is a shame because it feels like it wastes something really interesting – and also wastes Mbatha-Raw’s star-making turn. She is excellent – sweet and naïve, but growing in confidence, determination and wisdom, gaining the strength of will to shape her own destiny. The film introduces interesting themes as Belle begins to question the attitudes of her family – do they accept her because they must? Would they be as open to a black stranger? – but these themes don’t quite coalesce into something really solid and coherent. Instead they are trotted out, but we don’t really feel we learn anything.

Similarly, the case of the slave ship Zorg seems rather loosely defined. We don’t get a real sense of public pressure or interest in the case, or really understand the essentials of what the case involved. Instead, it’s used primarily as a tool to question the attitudes of Lord Mansfield, and whether he has the ability to expand his obvious love for Belle into a wider statement of man’s equality. Tom Wilkinson is very good as Mansfield – prickly, but essentially decent and caring under a gruff surface – even if the role can hardly be a challenge for him. But the film doesn’t really manage to make a really compelling argument about what it is trying to say, other than slavery is of course bad.

Elsewhere, the film takes simple shots and shoots fish in the barrel. The Ashton family are introduced to stand in for British society. Lord Ashton is brisk and businesslike and interested only in maintaining the status quo. Lady Ashton – played by Miranda Richardson at her most coldly standoffish – only cares about securing wealth for sons. Of those sons, James Norton gets the most interesting part as the decent but shallow Oliver. Poor Tom Felton though: his character might as well be Draco Malfoy in period costume, all but spitting out ‘Mudblood’ at Belle. None of these performances offer anything different from what we’ve seen before.

That’s part of the problem with Belle – it wastes an interesting idea by slowly turning it into a more conventional story, primarily focused on who is Belle going to marry, rather than the implications of a black woman in a racist society, or the hypocrisy of that society being only willing to accept her when she has money. Despite some good acting – Penelope Wilton and Emily Watson also give tender performances – and a star-turn in the lead, it’s not really that interesting a film. You keep expecting it to burst into life, but it never does: for such a film offering a fresh perspective on history, you don’t feel like you’ve learned anything new about Georgian society at the end of it.

The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015)


Dev Patel is mathematical genius Srinivasas Ramanujan, struggling against prejudice in The Man Who Knew Infinity

Director: Matthew Brown

Cast: Dev Patel (Srinivasas Ramanujan), Jeremy Irons (GH Hardy), Devika Bhise (Janaki), Toby Jones (John Edensor Littlewood), Stephen Fry (Sir Francis Spring), Jeremy Northam (Bertrand Russell), Kevin McNally (Percy MacMahon), Richard Johnson (Vice Master Henry Jackson), Anthony Calf (Howard), Padraic Delaney (Beglan), Shazad Latif (Chandra Mahalanobis)

The British Empire. It’s a difficult slice of British history, and it undoubtedly contributed to contemporary attitudes of superiority that affected British people and their institutions. It’s these attitudes that form the central themes of The Man Who Knew Infinity, an effective story of a struggle against the odds. 

In the early 1900s, Srinivasas Ramanujan (Dev Patel) works in Madras as a junior accountant – but his superiors quickly realise his mathematical abilities far outstrip his mundane tasks, and encourage him to write to mathematics professors to bring his theoretical work to their attention. Ramanujan starts a correspondence with GH Hardy (Jeremy Irons) of Trinity College, Cambridge, who invites him to England to explore his potential. Once there, Ramanujan quickly proves his genius but, despite Hardy’s support, he struggles to be accepted by the fellows and students of the college, who only see an upstart from the colonies.

The Man Who Knew Infinity is a conventionally structured biography – struggles personal and professional, success followed by setback and a final triumph combined with a bittersweet ending. It’s structurally nothing different from things you’ve seen before, but it’s told with calm, quiet, engrossing dedication, with unflashy direction, a solidly written script and some truly excellent acting. No wheel is reinvented, but it revolves with a highly enjoyable and heartfelt tenderness.

It’s a film that manages to present mathematics without using spurious real-world clunky metaphors, and gets a lovely feel for the hard work and theoretical study that go into mathematical theory. It also brilliantly communicates what the maths is about. I’m no theoretical mathematician (football stats are my limit) but even I could follow (just) why Ramanujan’s insights were so important and what they meant to the field of theoretical mathematics. The film has a real feel, not only for rhythms of academic work, but also the politics of academia (which needless to say are labyrinthine).

But the film’s main point is the resentment and outright racism Ramanujan must overcome. Played by Dev Patel with a quiet decency and modesty that only rarely bubbles over into bitterness, Ramanujan is constantly hit with everything from misunderstanding to contempt. His every achievement is met by questioning and doubt. His proofs must be demonstrated time and time again. To win the support and respect of his peers, he must constantly revise and revise his work, while the slightest slip is held up as proof his fraudulence or luck. 

If you do want to criticise the presentation of this, you could say that much of the campaigning and struggle for acceptance is championed by the establishment figure of Hardy – it’s he who does most to convert others, and who presents Ramanujan’s key theories to the Royal Society at the end. Stressing Ramanujan’s politeness and humbleness does have the downside of making him a slight passenger at times in his own movie.

But then it’s not just his movie, because this is a story of a deep, near romantic, bond that forms between the gentle Ramanujan and the shy and sensitive Hardy. Hardy, the film implies, was a man uncomfortable with emotional closeness, but he feels a huge bond with Ramanujan, having overcome similar class-based prejudice. The two men have a natural understanding, and support each other, finding themselves in perfect sync in their opinions on mathematics and their outlooks on life. In the nature of the British, nothing is ever said – but it’s clear that both men feel an intense personal connection that, quite possibly in Hardy’s case, mixes with a suppressed romantic yearning.

 

This relationship largely works so well because Jeremy Irons is quite simply fantastic as Hardy. Cast so often as superior types, here he gets to flex other parts of his arsenal as someone shy, timid, and sensitive. Hardy is so uncomfortable with personal friendships, he can rarely bring himself to look directly at other people. Irons sits on the edges of frames, or hunches and shrinks, his eyes permanently cast down. Saying that, he brings out the inner steel and determination in Hardy, his devotion as an advocate for Ramanujan. Irons is so shyly withdrawn, that the moments he allows emotional openness with Ramanujan, and most movingly with fellow mathematician Littlewood (played with a kindly good nature by Toby Jones), are wonderfully affecting. This might be one of Irons’ finest performances in his career.

The Man Who Knew Infinity is in many ways a conventional film, but performances like Irons’ lift it into something a little bit special. It’s a well-meaning and heartfelt film that embraces some fascinating concepts and also presents a story of triumph against adversity that feels genuinely moving and engaging. Filmically and narratively it’s very much by-numbers at times – but it hits those numbers so well, you’ll certainly have no complaints.

A United Kingdom (2016)


Rosamund Pike and David Oyelowo are a love match in underwhelming A United Kingdom

Director: Amma Asante

Cast: David Oyelowo (Seretse Khama), Rosamund Pike (Ruth Williams Khama), Terry Pheto (Naledi Khama), Vusi Kunens (Tshekedi Khama), Jack Davenport (Alistair Canning), Laura Carmichael (Muriel Williams-Sanderson), Jack Lowden (Tony Benn), Tom Felton (Rufus Lancaster), Charlotte Hope (Olivia Lancaster), Nicholas Lyndhurst (George Williams), Anastasia Hille (Dot Williams)

Some films just have a safe, crowd pleasing, “your whole family would like it” feel to them. A United Kingdom falls very neatly into this category. It’s a simple and straightforward story, told with a cosy safety that won’t challenge you or really stick in your memory.

Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo), heir to the throne of the Bamangwato tribe in what will become Botswana, is studying law in England in the late 1940s to prepare for his reign. He meets and falls in love with London girl Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike) – and despite the protests of their families and their nations, they marry and resolve to build a life in his country working for the betterment of his people. But first they must overcome what seem insurmountable obstacles.

A United Kingdom is a very well-meaning film. It has an important story to tell about acceptance and prejudice. Many of the points it makes about the negative reactions to mixed race marriages and colonial politics are still painfully relevant today. It’s an earnest and good-hearted film. It’s just a real shame that it’s also not that special.

It’s well acted by the two leads, we can give it that. Sure they are presented as almost flawless individuals, but David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike are engaging performers and give a lot of emotional weight to the story. Their courtship is sweetly hesitant and their relationship feels real and lived in. Oyelowo brings much of the magnetic charisma he has shown in a wide range of films to the part, and Pike’s neat mixture of prim Englishness, decency and stubborn self-determination work really well.

But the story it so simply done, the whole thing feels like a TV movie of the week. The film is flatly directed and conventionally shot: London is always dark, filmed through a blue lens, with rainwater or fog dripping off every shot. Africa by contrast is a vibrant, orange lensed place where every sunset and sunrise looks like a painting. Very few shots show much more imagination than that. There is no flair or originality to the cinematography, the composition of the shots, or even the musical score (which swells up stirringly at emotional moments and then fades instantly from memory). On every technical level, it can boast nothing more impressive than workman-like competence.

The narrative is equally simplistic: our heroes fall in love, deal with rejection, passionate speeches are made, allies are slowly won over and a deus ex machina finally makes everything fine. The stakes of what Seretse is putting at risk through his marriage are never made completely clear, despite all the talk of digging and diamonds. The final resolution of the entire problem is so simplified, contrived and rushed I almost had to double check the runtime to see if I missed anything. It’s all part of the same simplification in the story that sees sides change with confusing speed – Seretse’s sister goes from rejecting Ruth to treating her like a sister in a blink; Ruth’s father (distractingly played by Nicholas Lyndhurst, forever Rodney) is given one moment in a cinema to switch from prejudiced British working man to repentant father.

The characters themselves are very plainly drawn: they are either goodies or baddies with no attempt made to look at the deeper feelings or motivations behind them. For instance, Seretse’s uncle is shown as simply outraged by the marriage, with no attempt to explore why a marriage like this may not have been seen as ideal in a fragile community, or how it might have made holding a deal with the UK together difficult. Similarly, the Brit characters are almost to a man mustachio twirlers or bitchy mem-sahibs, callously sipping sherry as they thwart Seretse and Ruth’s plans. (Spare a thought for poor Tom Felton, yet again hired to play Draco Malfoy In A Different Historical Costume.)  Even Clement Attlee (so regularly beautified as the Prime Minister who oversaw the creation of the Welfare State and NHS) is portrayed here as a cold-hearted architect of realpolitik.

By making its lead characters so saintly and pure, and anyone who disagrees with them so cruel and sunk in villainy, the film weakens itself. Yes it has a sweet relationship at the middle, but it also manages to make this feel slightly lightweight, because the film itself is so flimsy. When their opponents are such cartoonish baddies, and their aims for their country so unclearly explained, it minimises the impact of the story. Instead of showing us the birth of a modern, democratic nation through the focal point of one couple’s struggle against prejudice and adversity, it makes both personal and national triumphs feel actually less impressive than they were – no more than a Sunday afternoon, Mills & Boon tale of a working class London girl and a handsome, “exotic” stranger.

A United Kingdom is an important story that has made itself into a slight one, a conventionally filmed and simplistically told tale that never carries the weight and impact it should do. Despite good performances from the leads, it’s really nothing special.

Hidden Figures (2016)


Octavia Spencer, Taraji P. Henson and Janelle Monáe are trying to make their way in a white man’s world

Director: Theodore Melfi

Cast: Taraji P. Henson (Katherine Goble), Octavia Spencer (Dorothy Vaughan), Janelle Monáe (Mary Jackson), Kevin Costner (Al Harrison), Kirsten Dunst (Vivian Mitchell), Jim Parsons (Paul Stafford), Glen Powell (John Glenn), Mahershala Ali (Colonel Jim Johnson)

The Space Race has a certain mysticism in American culture, epitomising a time of hope, where humanity literally touched the stars. And yet, amidst all this hope and aspiration, a whole section of America’s own population was being oppressed by racial segregation and prejudice. Hidden Figures brings these two aspects together by telling the stories of some of the black women who struggled against adversity to help send a man to the moon.

Hidden Figures is the sort of film Hollywood does very well: a warm, unfussy crowd-pleaser pushing all the expected emotional buttons, presenting an inspiring “based on true events” story . The film focuses on three black women pioneers at NASA. Katherine Goble (Taraji P. Henson) is a mathematical genius and widowed mother, promoted to work as a figures checker – and struggles to gain acceptance and equality with her fellow workers. Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) is the team leader in all but name (and pay) of a group of black female checkers, who decides to make herself invaluable as a computer expert. Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) works as an assistant to the engineering team, but struggles to gain the formal qualifications she needs to progress.

Truth be told, it isn’t anything special – it knows how to serve up its moments in an affecting way, but it’s filmed with a workmanlike flatness. Its structure and events are predictable – the standard arc of adversity, struggle, acceptance and triumph. But it’s still affecting for all that, and well made. It becomes a decent feel-good movie, and manages to never succumb to overt seriousness or heavy handed self-importance: it keeps the tone pretty light.

It’s a film about racial and sexual discrimination, but it avoids introducing an actual villain. The real opponent is “the way things are” – no single white character is particularly racist or unpleasant, just used to the system being what it is and, feeling only the benefits of it, feel no obligation to change it. It’s not just the white characters either – even Ali’s Colonel Johnson struggles to believe Katherine works at NASA as a mathematician, and this everyday sexism is as much a barrier to the women as race.

Melfi astutely picks a handful of key moments to showcase discrimination: from little moments like Goble being handed a bin to empty when she arrives on her first day, to the careful hierarchical games played as Dorothy addresses Kirstin Dunst’s supervisor as “Miss Mitchell”, while always being called “Dorothy” in return. This sits alongside more overt moments: Hidden Figures probably has a claim to fame as being the only film to feature a toilet trip as its dramatic highlight – Gobley having to run over 15 minutes across the campus to use the “Coloured Women’s” bathroom, a situation only resolved by the intervention of her grizzled boss (an effective Kevin Costner). The design also works well to help visually make the woman stand out as different in the sea of white NASA men around them.

Spot the odd one out in NASA

If the characters do fall into a standard pattern (the quiet professional one, the motherly one, the firebrand), the acting is still extremely good. Henson is terrific as the quiet anchor of the film – it’s particularly admirable as the role largely isn’t showy or flashy. But she brings a quiet, assured professionalism, making Goble a woman who knuckles down and gets on with it, whose quiet assurance wins eventual respect. The love story between her and Ali’s Colonel Johnson is also very sweet. Spencer is very good as Vaughan, particularly the way she suggests resentment just below the surface of her motherly exterior. Monáe has the least interesting role, but her bolshiness serves as a nice contrast to the other leads.

The tricky thing when a film purports to be a piece of history, is when you find out much of what you watched didn’t actually happen. The racial segregation we see so prevalent in NASA just wasn’t quite the case in real life. The obstacles and barriers placed before our heroines largely didn’t happen. Even segregated bathrooms (a key motif in the film) were not an issue at NASA. Many of the events we see didn’t happen – or not like this – and the vast majority of the supporting characters are composite inventions. After investing in the struggles of the three characters, it’s easy to feel that the revelation that it was (almost) all made-up has cheapened the impact of the story.

However, what is true is: even if NASA wasn’t as bad as this, most of the rest of America was. So even if this film makes working in NASA look a lot worse in the 1960s than it in fact was, it does feel very true if taken as a general impression of what life in America was like back then for black Americans. So although the film has to brush up and embellish things that actually happened, it does feel very true to the general experience of being both black and a woman in the 1960s. All of which is a way of giving the film a bit of a pass for its inaccuracy. It might be gilding the lily of the struggles these women had in NASA, but it is certainly a real impression of what black women experienced in America at the time – in fact the reality was almost certainly worse.

Hidden Figures is a charming enough film, even though it’s a pretty predictable and unsurprising one. It pushes all the Hollywood buttons you would expect with confidence, and while its story arcs don’t deviate much from the “inspiring movie” template, they do work very well. Its historical accuracy is ropey, but it does feel like it gives a very good sense of the attitudes of the time – capturing both the almost atmosphere of hope in 1960s America, and also the everyday horrors of segregation and racial oppression. It also has some terrific performances. It may be a safe, crowd-pleaser of a film – but it does please the crowds well.

The Butler (2013)


Forest Whitaker takes on a lifetime of service, as the Civil Rights movement meets Downton Abbey

Director: Lee Daniels

Cast: Forest Whitaker (Cecil Gaines), Oprah Winfrey (Gloria Gaines), David Oyelowo (Louis Gaines), Cuba Gooding Jnr (Carter Wilson), Lenny Kravitz (James Holloway), Colman Domingo (Freddie Fallows), Yaya DeCosta (Carol Hammie), Terrence Howard (Howard), Adriane Lenox (Gina), Elijah Kelley (Charlie Gaines), Clarence Williams III (Maynard), John Cusack (Richard Nixon), Jane Fonda (Nancy Reagan), James Marsden (John F. Kennedy), Vanessa Redgrave (Annabeth Westfall), Alan Rickman (Ronald Reagan), Liev Schreiber (Lyndon B. Johnson), Robin Williams (Dwight D Eisenhower)

Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) grows up on a plantation in the South; after his mother is raped and his father killed by the son of the house, the family matriarch (Vanessa Redgrave) takes him on as a house servant as a token gesture of regret. His training here sets him on the path to working in a succession of increasingly wealthy hotels and, finally, the White House. Over 30 years, he serves the Presidents in office, never involving himself or commenting on policy, proud of his service to his country. This often puts him in conflict with his Civil Rights activist son Louis (David Oyelowo), with his wife Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) stuck in the middle.

This is the sort of film that feels designed to win awards. It’s based on a vague true story (it changes nearly all the events of course) and it’s about a big subject. It’s got big name actors doing acting. It aims at big themes. What it actually is, is a film that misses its marks. It’s a film that spends time with big themes but has nothing to say about them, or in fact anything interesting to say full stop. It assumes that the historical context will do the work, and leaves it at that. Instead, it settles for trite sentimentality and cliché, personal stories played on a stage that makes those stories seem slight and inconsequential rather than giving them reflective depth.

The biggest problem about the film, leaving aside its heavy-handed sentimentality and mundane predictable storytelling, is that all the way through it feels like we are following the wrong story. It’s such a vibrant and exciting period of history, so full of events, passion and struggle: and instead we follow the story of Cecil, essentially a bland passive character who achieves very little and influences even less. There are vague references to leading “the regular life” and how working in domestic service is like some sort of subversive act to demonstrate the education and hard-working possibilities of the minority, but to be honest it never really convinces.

The film promises that Cecil was a man who had a profound impact on the people he served – but this doesn’t come across at all. Instead, the parade of star turns playing US Presidents are there it seems for little more than box office: we see them speaking about Civil Rights issues or planning policy, but we get very little sense of Cecil having any bond with them. The cameos instead become a rather distracting parade, as if the film was worried (perhaps rightly) that Cecil’s story was so slight and bland that they needed the historical all-stars to drum up any interest in it. It doesn’t help that the cameos are mixed – Rickman, Schreiber and Marsden do okay with cardboard cut-out expressions, but Cusack in particular seems horribly miscast. A braver film would have kept these pointless camoes in the background and focused the narrative on Cecil and his colleagues below stairs, and their struggles to gain equal payment with their white colleagues. This film is seduced by the famous events and names it spends the rest of the time backing away from.

The performance at the centre is also difficult to engage with. Forest Whitaker is such an extreme, grand guignol actor that it’s almost sad to see him squeeze himself into a dull jobsworth such as Cecil. Whitaker seems so determined to play it down that he mumbles inaudibly at great length (it’s genuinely really difficult to understand what he is saying half the time), slouching and buttoning himself into Cecil’s character. It doesn’t come across as a great piece of character creation, more a case of miscasting. Oprah Winfrey does well as his wife, although her character is utterly inconsistent: at times a drunk depressive, at others level-headed and calm. The link of either of these characters to the hardships of life as a Black American or their role in racial politics is murkily unclear.

The star turn of the film – and virtually all its interesting content – is from David Oyelowo, who ages convincingly through the film from idealist to activist to elder statesman. His story also intersects with the actual historical events that are taking place in America and he is an active participant – unlike Cecil the passive viewer, just as likely to switch the TV off as follow the news. Often I found myself wishing the film could follow his character rather than Whitaker’s.

That’s the problem with the film: what point is it trying to make? The film seems to want to honour Cecil’s service in the White house – but the film is a slow journey towards Cecil’s sudden revelation that maybe his son’s campaigning for Civil Rights was the right thing to do. This flies in the face of the film’s tribute to Cecil’s decades of quiet, unjudging service: the film can’t make up its mind whether it wants to salute Cecil for being an unjudging, dedicated servant to a long line of Presidents, or for having the courage to take a political stance towards the end. It’s having its cake and eating it. It’s this shallow lack of stance that finally makes it an empty and rather dull viewing experience.

Selma (2014)

Martin Luther King fights the good fight

Director: Ava DuVernay
Cast: David Oyelowo (Martin Luther King), Tom Wilkinson (President Lyndon B. Johnson), Carmen Ejogo (Coretta Scott King), Andre Holland (Andrew Young), Tessa Thompson (Diane Nash), Giovanni Ribisi (Lee C. White), Lorraine Toussaint (Amelia Boynton Robinson), Stephan James (John Lewis), Wendell Pierce (Hosea Williams), Common (James Bevel), Alessandro Nivola (John Doar), Tim Roth (George Wallace), Oprah Winfrey (Annie Lee Cooper)

Tragically, for a while this film seemed to be most famous for being the poster child for “Oscar-Gate” or hashtag oscarssowhite (sorry hashtags are not my thing). Selma was the film that should have been littered with nominations. Instead it got just two – one for Picture, one for Best Song. Of the many, many snubs the most shocking were Ava DuVernay and David Oyelowo, particularly as other contenders up for the awards had certainly done inferior work that year . This film, however, categorically demands to be remembered in its own right – it is a fine, very moving piece of work, a dynamic history lesson that avoids preaching from a pulpit.

A lot of this comes down to the breathtaking work from David Oyelowo, who delivers one of those performances where the actor seems to transcend his skin, not just imitating Martin Luther King but inhabiting him, exploring and expressing every depth and shade. It’s a performance that stands comparison with Daniel Day-Lewis’ Abraham Lincoln. Oyelowo’s King is a big hearted, patient man but also a shrewd political player, a family man who betrays his wife, a political campaigner who holds the big picture and the small in his mind. It’s a totally committed performance that is intensely respectful without ever feeling hagiographic.

Oyelowo’s performance also immeasurably helps the film’s structure, as this is a biography that focuses on one single key moment in its subject’s life, rather than attempting to cover the whole lot in one 2-3 hour sitting. I rather like this, as the important thing about these biopics is to understand the person at the centre, not just to tick off events in their life. Anyway this film focuses on three months in 1965: King is campaigning for equal voting rights, and planning a high-profile march across Alabama from Selma and Montgomery to pressure President Lyndon B Johnson to promote the Voting Rights Act.

This is a very powerful film, humming with a constant sense of the deep rooted injustice and oppression in America at this time. It makes no compromises in showing the violence meted out to Black Americans, but it’s the day-to-day injustice that DuVernay shows particularly well: in the opening scene, Annie Lee Cooper (played by producer Oprah Winfrey) has her carefully prepared application to vote cruelly dismissed by a smalltown clerk, gleefully and casually exploiting a succession of legal loopholes to thwart her. It’s a simple scene but amazingly powerful in its casual (unspoken) racism, and it brings to life in a few strokes the day-to-day experience of millions of people at this time.

It’s also a beautifully shot film, that uses the real-life location of the Selma bridge spectacularly. An assault on the first attempted march by mounted policeman, shrouded in tear gas, is deeply moving in its simplicity, the camera catching the brutal overreaction of the police with a journalistic eye (Wendell Pierce as Hosea Williams is particularly impressive in the build-up to, and aftermath of, this sequence). Other moments of violence are equally shocking, but DuVernay never over-eggs the moment, allowing the events and the story to speak for themselves. We know how terrible some of these events are, and how disgusting the treatment of Black Americans was – the film never uses music or editing to hammer it home to us.

The film ends on the kind of high note you can only feel when injustice has been overcome and decent people triumph (punctured, DuVernay acknowledges, by the fates of some of the characters,  revealed at the end of the film. More than one of these is a gut punch – not least the death of King himself three years later). But it’s never twee, preachy or a history lesson. Instead it’s a living, breathing expression of a moment in history that wraps you up in its story. Oyelowo is of course outstanding, but there is some excellent support, not least from Carmen Ejogo as his wife Coretta (overlooked at the time, but outstanding), Andre Holland, Stephen James, Lorraine Toussaint and Common as King’s fellow Civil Rights leaders. Tom Wilkinson adds a lot of depth to a sometimes thinly written Johnson, while Tim Roth translates his contempt for George Wallace in a performance of slappable vileness. A beautiful and marvellous film.