At the beginning of Ava DuVernay’s extraordinary “Selma,” we hear Martin Luther King, Jr. (David Oyelowo), indulging a private joke with Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo), about how, long ago, they were going to settle down in a small university town and lead a simple life as a preacher and his wife. The year is 1964, and the Kings are in a hotel room in Oslo; he is donning an ascot and a cutaway coat before receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. In his fancy duds, he’s self-mocking yet proud, a crusader at rest. Throughout the movie, we hear the voice that we remember—measured and confident, and then, on the podium, full-blooded and exalted. In this film, once King launches into any kind of utterance, nothing can stop him. The British actor David Oyelowo adds something of his own to the role, an extra layer of meditative richness and a touch of sexual playfulness (King is flirting with his wife in the hotel). He also underlines King’s idiosyncratic way of emphasizing the first syllable of words, which injects jolts of energy into the smooth and even tones. This King is slightly contemptuous; his composure is barbed.
King returns from Oslo just as the civil-rights movement is entering one of its most crucial phases. Earlier in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) had pushed the Civil Rights Act through Congress, ending legalized segregation. Now he wants to move on to the War on Poverty. But King insists on a voting-rights act, to abolish the civics and literacy tests and other tactics used to prevent millions of African-Americans from participating in elections. King fights Johnson in the Oval Office, on the phone, and from the street. He knows that a large number of people plan to march the fifty miles from Selma to the Alabama state capitol, in Montgomery, where they will demand to exercise their right to vote, and that, when they do, white racists, goaded by Governor George Wallace (Tim Roth), will explode in front of the newspaper reporters and the TV cameras. Johnson understands what King is up to, and accuses him of reckless opportunism. The two struggle face to face, as DuVernay re-creates in personal terms one of the defining moments in the life of the nation.
The script, in its original form, was drafted by an English screenwriter, Paul Webb, in 2007. Then it floated for years. Oyelowo always wanted to play King, and, at various times, such directors as Michael Mann, Stephen Frears, Paul Haggis, Spike Lee, and Lee Daniels were interested in the project, which fell apart for lack of sufficient funding. During that time, DuVernay, now forty-two, was working as a film publicist and marketer in Los Angeles. As late as 2011, even after she had directed a feature (“I Will Follow”), she was still a unit publicist (on “The Help”). Oyelowo, who had starred in her 2012 feature, “Middle of Nowhere,” kept advocating on her behalf. Pathé U.K. finally put up the money, with assistance from producers including Brad Pitt and Oprah Winfrey, and Paramount took over distribution.
That a female African-American director was the person finally able to tackle this subject (on a budget of just twenty million dollars) is important, but it’s secondary to the fact that DuVernay has made a very good movie. Like “Lincoln,” it avoids the lifetime-highlights tendency of standard bio-pics and concentrates instead on a convulsive political process within a fraught period. The compression forces her to capture an entire movement—its gravity, its moralism, its tactical shrewdness—in three marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma. King’s greatest mastery, as DuVernay shows (she rewrote the script), lay in his resourcefulness and in the way he dominated logistical strategy sessions, primarily with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. (The men’s appearance, in their sombre dark suits, white shirts, black ties, and hats, was as dramatically effective as any created by revolutionaries anywhere.) In several key scenes, King faces down James Forman and John Lewis, the young leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who were already working in Alabama and initially rejected the S.C.L.C. as interlopers. In one of the few weaknesses in the movie, the actors cast as Lewis (Stephan James) and Forman (Trai Byers) come off as generic angry young men rather than as individuals. King soothes and inflames them at the same time.
This is cinema, more rhetorical, spectacular, and stirring than cable-TV drama: again and again, DuVernay’s camera (Bradford Young did the cinematography) tracks behind characters as they march, or gentles toward them as they approach, receiving them with a friendly hand. At one point during the first march, the camera slowly rises and peers over a massive beam on the Edmund Pettus Bridge as hundreds of people advance across it. When Alabama state troopers release tear gas and charge on horseback, attacking the marchers with clubs and whips, the screen goes white from the gas, as if shrouded in terror, and the camera hurtles past marchers scrambling to get off the bridge. Many are injured, including the activist Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey). The episode, which took place on March 7, 1965—Bloody Sunday—invokes the tumultuous crowd scenes from silent Soviet classics by Eisenstein and Pudovkin. During the clashes in the White House, however, DuVernay lets the words and the actors carry the meaning. The reliably impressive Tom Wilkinson recalls, without the slightest exaggeration, L.B.J.’s looming head and neck, his heavy hands, his easy way with profanity. The icy confrontation between Johnson and Wallace—whom Roth plays as sarcastic and wily, with a lizard smile—is a minor classic in itself. Historical irony abounds in bio-pic land: our unique American heritage exists onscreen courtesy of talented British actors.
DuVernay’s timing couldn’t be more relevant. Next year marks the fiftieth anniversary of both the Selma marches and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court overturned a key provision of the act last year, and Republican legislatures across the country have been deploying new voter-I.D. laws. Faced with all that—and with the recent turmoil in Ferguson, Cleveland, and New York—King would have noticed how far we have yet to go, shaken his head, and set to work.
Clint Eastwood’s “American Sniper” is both a devastating war movie and a devastating antiwar movie, a subdued celebration of a warrior’s skill and a sorrowful lament over his alienation and misery. The movie, set during the Iraq War, has the troubled ambivalence about violence that has shown up repeatedly in Eastwood’s work since the famous scene, midway through “Unforgiven,” in which the act of killing anguishes the killer. Eastwood, working with the screenwriter Jason Hall and with Bradley Cooper, who stars in the film, has adapted the 2012 best-selling autobiography by the Navy seal sharpshooter Chris Kyle (which was written with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice). “American Sniper” is devoted to Kyle’s life as a son, a husband, a father, and, most of all, a decorated military man—one of the most lethal snipers in U.S. military history. Kyle, who made a hundred and sixty confirmed kills (and more than two hundred probable kills), is always sure that he’s defending American troops—and his country—against “savages.” Perched on a rooftop in Ramadi or in Sadr City, he’s methodical and imperturbable, and he rarely misses, even at great distance. He shoots insurgents, members of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and, when he thinks it necessary, a woman and a child. He’s haunted by the thought of the Americans he hasn’t been able to save. Cooper is all beefed up—by beer as much as by iron, from the looks of it (it’s intentionally not a movie-star body)—and he gives a performance that’s vastly different from any that he’s given in the past. With fellow-seals in the field, he’s convivial, profane, and funny; at home with his loving wife (Sienna Miller, who’s excellent), he’s increasingly withdrawn and dead-eyed, enraptured only by the cinema of war playing in his mind.
Eastwood’s command of this material makes most directors look like beginners. As Kyle and his men ride through rubble-strewn Iraqi cities, smash down doors, and race up and down stairways, the camera records what it needs to fully dramatize a given event, and nothing more. There’s no waste, never a moment’s loss of concentration, definition, or speed. The general atmosphere of the cities, and the scattered life of the streets, gets packed into the action. The movie, of course, makes us uneasy, and it is meant to. Like Hitchcock in “Rear Window” and Michael Powell in “Peeping Tom,” Eastwood puts us inside the camera lens, allowing us to watch the target in closeup as Kyle pulls the trigger. Eastwood has become tauntingly tough-minded: “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” he seems to be saying. And, with the remorselessness of age, he follows Chris Kyle’s rehabilitation and redemption back home, all the way to their heartbreaking and inexplicable end. ♦