Trying to understand oppression

 Isabel Wilkerson’s best-selling book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, should be digested, argued with, and discussed. 

   A highly regarded journalist who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson took on a monumental task. She sought a unifying theory to explain oppression, something that might, in her view, go deeper than racism, which has become a catch-all for all manner of issues -- from social slights to murder.

  Mixing personalized reporting and theoretical thinking, Wilkerson traveled to India and Germany to  examine the role caste played in creating brutally stratified social systems at various historical points. She also assayed the role caste continues to play in today's world.

  To call this a "big" inquiry understates the scope of Wilkerson’s thesis-building ambition. 

   How is any of this the basis for a movie? 

   Director Ava DuVernay answers the question by taking a stylistically eclectic approach while focusing  on Wilkerson's quest for answers.  

   For DuVernay, Wilkerson's book becomes a springboard for a cinematic essay that begins when an editor (Blair Underwood) asks Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) to look into the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin.

  Initially resistant, Wilkerson begins to search for something deeper, something that might recast (you'll pardon the pun) views about what we commonly refer to as "racism." 

   At a social gathering, Wilkerson describes "racism" as a default word that's starting to lose its meaning.

   She eventually concludes that caste better explains oppression. Why else would an all-white society such as Nazi Germany create a hierarchy in which Jews were demonized and murdered?

   Ellis-Taylor ably conveys the ceaseless drive that can push a journalist to dig deeper, the dissatisfaction that comes from suspecting that there's more to a story than meets even the intelligent eye.

  DuVernay rounds out the movie with an often sad personal dimension. While researching, Wilkerson deals with the death of both her husband (John Bernthal) and her mother (Emily Yancy). 

  The film uses Wilkerson’s relationship with a cousin (Niecy Nash) as a bridge to connect the theoretical and the practical, one of Wilkerson's strengths as a writer, to ground ideas in experiences that can be felt.

    That beloved cousin also dies while Wilkerson is working on her book, adding more grief  to a movie that’s overloaded with it. 

    While in Germany, Wilkerson learns that Nazi lawyers looked to Jim Crow to help design their campaign against Jews, presenting the information as we watch re-enactments of a book burning and a meeting of Nazi lawyers.

   In what I took as an important encounter, a German woman questions Wilkerson’s thesis about similarities between US and German history regarding slavery and the Holocaust, condemning both but insisting on their differences.

   The exchange is portrayed as an insult to the author rather than a valid intellectual challenge. I think that may have something to do with how the scene is played, but in a movie that's not afraid of talk, the discussion could have gone further.

    If you’re interested in this topic, you can read James Q. Whitman's Hitler's American Model (2017), a scholarly work that examines the extent to which Nazi lawyers studied Jim Crow laws.

    A digression? Maybe. But Origin also can be viewed as digressive. The pieces of DuVernay's jigsaw don't always fit neatly together, and the movie may be more successful as the story of a search for answers  than as an endorsement of any conclusions.

  At times, the film feels like a documentary, particularly when Wilkerson travels to India to learn about the country's Dalit population. She's looking for the ways caste connects oppressed populations in different countries.

  DuVernay also recounts the story of four anthropologists -- two black and two white -- who produced a landmark 1941 book (Deep South), a study of caste and class during the days of Jim Crow. 

   Origin sometimes threatens to become a CliffNotes version of Wilkerson’s book and Wilkerson can sound a bit didactic when she's expounding on the controlling web woven by caste. Blind acceptance of caste makes it seem as if it's part of the natural order, to paraphrase something she says at a gathering of friends and family.

    However you regard Wilkerson's encompassing idea -- which I think tends to go further than the specifics of her observations allow -- Origin stands as a work of telling detail and admirable intent: to provoke, illuminate, and encourage us to see and feel the world through Wilkerson's eyes -- and DuVernay's, as well.

     Judging by her work, I'd say Wilkerson isn't content to operate in default mode. Judging by  Origin, I'd say DuVernay isn't, either.

   

   

Catching Up: 'Small Engine Repair' and 'Starling'

Two quick hits on movies I missed. Put these brief reviews under the heading “Better Late Than Never.” 

Small Engine Repair

Set in Manchester, New Hampshire, Small Engine Repair adapts a play by John Pollono for the screen. Pollono portrays Frank, a guy who runs the repair shop of the title. He has two pals (Shea Whigham and John Bernthal). For a while, it looks as if Small Engine Repair is going to be another evening with the bros, guys who often jockey to see who can be grosser. Pals for a long time, the men argue in a bar and stop talking. The story then leaps ahead to a night when Frank invites his estranged buddies to the repair shop for an evening of reconciliation. Another study in toxic masculinity, Small Engine Repair features performances by Jordana Spiro (as Frank's ex-wife) and Ciara Brava (as Frank's college-age daughter). The movie begins to shift gears when a college kid (Spencer House) shows up at Frank's shop and Pollono's screenplay begins to raise serious issues involving privacy, internet abuse, class conflict, and revenge. None of these themes are fleshed out enough to compensate for flashbacks of variable power and an ending that seems contrived to take some of the sting out of the meanness that precedes it. And in a movie focused largely on "the guys,'' Spiro has the movie's most commanding moment.

Starling

Starling, a movie about a husband and wife (Melissa McCarthy and Chris O'Dowd) attempting to cope with the loss of an infant daughter, casts Kevin Kline as a veterinarian who once was a prominent psychiatrist. The oddball combo of carers is indicative of something about the movie: Director Theodore Melfi mixes what seem like mismatched elements in a movie that makes a powerful subject seem almost banal. Burdened by sentiment, the movie derives its title from a bird that pesters McCarthy's character as she tries to garden. The screenplay by Matt Harris uses the bird -- a starling, of course -- as a metaphor for nest building and even, at one point, has McCarthy's Lily trying to nurse the pesky  bird back to health after she hits it with a stone. The movie mistakenly separates Lily and her husband Jack, who's in a mental institution after the loss of the child, which means we never really see them trying to work out their issues. No point in faulting the performances, but Starling is a wounded bird of a movie that just doesn't fly. 

Stuck in the mud of war

Brad Pitt leads a tank crew in a movie full of harrowing war imagery.

By April of 1945, U.S. troops had advanced deep into German territory. For Germany, the war already was lost. Humiliation and surrender loomed.

Despite being set on the eve of the impending Allied triumph, the mood of director David Ayer's Fury remains forbidding and dark. Seldom has victory looked quite this grim.

If there's freshness in Ayer's approach, it's found just here: It doesn't really matter whether soldiers are fighting on the first or last day of a war: Many will die. Brutality doesn't stop just because the end is near.

The opening image of Ayer's movie has a haunting, nearly surreal quality. A German soldier rides a white horse onto an open field. We don't know where the soldier's headed or why he's on horse back.

Seconds later, a lone figure springs from a U.S. tank. Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Brad Pitt) leaps on the German officer, pulls him off his horse and stabs him to death.

In one image, Ayer vanquishes any thoughts we might have had about the romance of war.

Fury offers lots more unsettling imagery, sights presumably intended to make us see the war with fresh eyes, to absorb its intensity and fear in ways that we haven't yet experienced. To say Fury has a kind of bleak power may sound like a turn-off, but that's precisely what we're supposed to feel with a movie such as this.

Pitt's performance as an Army sergeant in charge of a war-weary tank crew inevitably will remind audiences of the character he played in Inglourious Basterds, but Pitt's Collier is more complex than Lt. Aldo Raine.

A hardened veteran, Collier parcels out his human impulses sparingly, almost as if he's afraid of tapping out an already depleted supply.

The rest of Collier's crew consists of Boyd "Bible" Swan (Shia LaBeouf), Trini "Gordo" Garcia (Michael Pena) and Grady "Coon Ass" Travis (John Bernthal). Scott Eastwood portrays Sergeant Miles, another member of the crew.

The plot -- hardly a groundbreaker -- begins when a newbie (Logan Lerman) joins Collier's tank crew in what seems a desperate or possibly haphazard move by the Army.

Lerman's Norman Ellison has spent most of the war as a clerk typist. He has no tank training, and makes a reluctant warrior, someone whose unwillingness to kill is seen as a threat by his comrades in arms.

Much of the story involves the ways in which Lerman's character is toughened -- at first against his will and later with vengeful relish.

In Ayer's world, the members of the tank crew are bonded, but they're not always admirable. Bernthal's Travis can seem like a borderline sadist. So does Collier, at times.

The point, of course, is that the savagery of war tends to turn men into brutes regardless of what uniform they happen to be wearing.

The actors all mold their performances to fit the dreary, mud-soaked landscapes that become another character in the hands of cinematographer Roman Vasyanov.

The movie offers up equal amounts of combat and desperation, although there's an interlude in which Collier and Ellison enter the apartment of a couple of German women (Anamaria Marinca and Alicia von Rittberg). The soldiers are in a town that just has been taken. Some of them are looking for sex and spoils.

At first, the scene humanizes Collier, but there's a terrible, growing tension when the rest of the tank crew shows up, wondering why they've been excluded from what appears to be a moment's pleasure and respite.

Ayer made his cinematic bones with viscerally charged movies such as End of Watch, which focused on cops in South Central Los Angeles. He makes full use of his talent for violent immediacy here, bringing it to scene-after-scene.

Fury also reminds us that shocking sights can become routine if seen in abundance: Dead bodies are flatted by tank treads, and the ugliness of war unfolds under dark, apprehensive skies.

The movie's finale involves a terrible battle in which Collier's crew (unbelievably, I think) decides to face an entire SS battalion, a decision that's tantamount to a death sentence. Is it courage or a death wish from soldiers who know they'll never again adjust to normal life? Will anyone survive?

When stripped of all its grim atmospherics, Fury may not seem radically different from lots of other war movies that follow small groups of men into the teeth of war.

But story arc may not be the point here: Ayer seems to be trying to give us a more vividly disturbing picture than the one sometimes associated with the so-called Greatest Generation.

With hindsight, idealism may be possible. On the battlefield, it's a forgotten luxury.