This Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents adaption is as ambitious as it is clumsy.
In Ava DuVernay’s Origin, the political and the personal are intricately entwined. In her adaptation of the latter’s 2020 nonfiction book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, writer-director and Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of the book’s origins and the personal tragedies that challenged and inspired the author in addition to dramatising the historical disasters Wilkerson used to support her main thesis. By doing this,
DuVernay aims to fuse the compassionate intimacy of her 2014 biopic Selma with the empirical methodology of her critical documentary 13th, which explores the prison industrial complex. Origin is both cumbersome and audacious in its traversal of continents, centuries, and forms of address.
The terrifying depiction of Trayvon Martin’s (Myles Frost) death by George Zimmerman opens Origin. Because it’s such a common tragedy, the film’s beginning point seems a little too obvious. But instead of being merely provocative, it acts as an intriguin starting point for Wilkerson’s (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) journey, which explores and eventually challenges the categorization of a wide range of beliefs and behaviours as racism.
A newspaper editor named Amari (Blair Underwood) approaches Wilkerson shortly after Martin’s death asking him to write about the tragedy and how it sparked a large-scale national movement.
However, Wilkerson finds it difficult to accept that Zimmerman’s actions were only driven by prejudice, especially after hearing the horrifying 911 calls that he and a worried neighbour made.
She is left wondering if there was a bigger reason why a Latino guy would kill a Black youngster, ostensibly (or maybe unintentionally) to defend a neighbourhood that is predominately white.
It’s a powerful way to reframe a story that was primarily told in black and white, and there are scenes where Wilkerson challenges the more mainstream viewpoints of Amari, who believes Zimmerman’s motivations are racist,
and Emily Yancy, who wishes Martin had told Zimmerman where he was going and makes the case—consciously or unconsciously—for Black subservience. These conversations put us in the head of a writer who is starting to realise that she is going to develop a novel theory of American hierarchy. More significantly, these scenes are full of a depth and intrigue that are frequently absent from the rest of the movie.
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Following Martin’s death, Wilkerson experiences her own tragedies, which encourage her to delve deeper into the theory that the establishment of caste systems—rather than an underlying racism—is what connects the numerous acts of human oppression and extinction.
Unquestionably unsettling, these scenes are appreciated for their sudden departure from the biographical rhythms of the movie. However, as Origin keeps alternating between traditional biographical portraiture and historical reenactment, it’s difficult to ignore the question of why DuVernay didn’t consider Origin to be a documentary.
The emotional impact of Wilkerson’s turbulent personal journey and of those historical catastrophes we watch unfold on television offers ever decreasing returns because of its increasingly fractured dramatic framework.
Moreover, a few of Wilkerson’s sequences have a didactic tone that occasionally comes across as patronising, maybe because the filmmakers found it difficult to condense complex concepts into soundbites or short vignettes.
Wilkerson’s confrontation with a rude plumber (Nick Offerman) sporting a “Make America Great Again” cap is almost painfully realistic, and her conversation with two German academics regarding their nation’s prohibition of the Nazi symbol and the continuation of the Confederate flag on a U.S. state flag is so direct that it seems like it was written for a high school history class.
It makes sense that DuVernay feels compelled to deliver these concepts with the utmost directness in the midst of the ongoing battle over what kinds of history can even be taught in the United States, even though there are instances in which using a sledgehammer when a chisel would have been far more effective.
When Wilkerson is seen outlining her eight fundamental “pillars” of caste on a white board, it’s obvious that a long documentary would be required to properly and thoroughly examine these concepts.
Audaciously, DuVernay attempts to make Caste’s ideas more approachable for a general audience by fusing the emotional impact of a melodrama with Wilkerson’s theoretical standpoint.
The theories that Wilkerson outlined in her book come to life with an emotional clarity that may be powerful because of Ellis-Taylor’s unwavering portrayal, but the film’s frequently clumsy, choppy structure also works against that clarity. Fittingly or not, Origin shares a sense of internal conflict with our complex country.