ORIGIN (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

Origin, Neon

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 7, 2023

There's such ambition to writer/director Ava DuVernay's Origin that even a basic description of the film's plot and method might make it seem ungainly. At its core, DuVernay has adapted a non-fiction book about the intersections and interconnectivity of caste systems throughout the world and history.

This is no documentary, though. It's also a snapshot biography of that book's author, as she deals with the overwhelming nature of the thesis she has proposed and the devastating grief of losing two of the most important people in her life, while also grappling with the potential loss of a third.

In other words, the political and personal, as they so routinely do in life, collide in this film in ways that don't always add up within its massive scope. What matters, perhaps, is that DuVernay tells both of these two sides of the story with genuine thoughtfulness and complete sincerity, so it almost doesn't matter if the narrative is messy and the thematic concerns don't always line up in neat ways. This film cares about its thesis as much as it feels for and admires that thesis' author, and the impact of both threads is palpable, regardless of how the filmmaker does and doesn't weave them together.

The writer is Isabel Wilkerson, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor with emotional conviction and intellectual curiosity, and the planned book will become Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. In terms of adapting the latter, DuVernay dramatizes the author's private interrogation of an idea that has come into her head and will not leave it, while also following her on investigative trips to the American South, Berlin, and India. Anecdotes and case studies play out, too, in the manner of dramatic re-creations we might expect from a documentary treatment of the same material.

The big question, then, is a basic one of form. Why hasn't DuVernay, who is no stranger to non-fiction filmmaking, simply made a documentary about and dissecting Wilkerson's book? It's a fair one, perhaps, because so much of this narrative—especially a later section, when the film's Isabel puts a marker to a board and her fingers to a keyboard to organize and establish the pillars of her central argument—is about laying out Wilkerson's case in clear, comprehensible ways. It takes on the goals of a documentary, in other words, without actually becoming one.

The reason, though, appears to be an equally simple one, too. Wilkerson's own story is as important to the film's concerns as the argument she comes to develop about how caste systems emerge, strengthen, and, even after their "official" end, linger within and across various societies.

Here's a writer who faces multiple points of skepticism about her thesis, given that it takes a broader view than most individuals see in their own lives and the society in which they live, but who must push through those doubts and take that pushback into consideration. We get to the witness the formation of the idea itself, instead of having it presented to us in a tidy package. Since it's a lot to digest, that approach makes it a bit easier, while also showing how all of those critiques bring Isabel to a firmer understanding of her argument.

Beyond that, there's also challenge of Isabel researching and writing her book amidst a cloud of mourning. Within a year, her husband Brett (Jon Bernthal) and mother Ruby (Emily Yancy) die, while her sisterly cousin Marion (Niecy Nash-Betts) is struggling with cancer. She loses two sources of unflappable support, fears losing a third, finds herself in a state of depression, and, still, must get to work with the specter of loss so close and so inescapable.

Isabel's research and thesis are all about connective tissue—how slavery and segregation in the United States, the anti-Jewish laws and genocide of Nazi Germany, and the formerly lawful but still on-going caste system of India tie together to explain how and why some are deemed "inferior" to a supposedly "superior" group of people. The connective tissue of DuVernay's film, then, becomes grief—Isabel's loss and the incalculable loss of the dignity, freedom, and lives of so many countless people to within the foundation of a caste system in multiple parts of the world and throughout history.

DuVernay isn't making a direct comparison, of course. It's more a matter of tone. Just as the depiction of Isabel's investigative and interrogation work helps us to understand the book's core point, the film's tone makes the argument more relatable and empathetic on a personal level. It opens with the ordinary events that would lead to the killing of Trayvon Martin (played by Myles Frost), and after that, it moves to the lives of August Landmesser (Finn Wittrock), the apparent identity of the German man in a famous photo refusing to do the Nazi salute in a crowd, and his Jewish partner Irma Eckler (Victoria Pedretti).

From there, it moves to two married couples and anthropologist who did undercover work to expose the inherent and inevitable violence of the Jim Crow South. Finally, the narrative and Isabel arrive in India, where systematic reform within the country hasn't changed the systemic oppression of the Dalits—the so-called "untouchables" of society. There's a sequence in which Isabel's ideas and those dramatized horrors of the past are juxtaposed, and its service as a climax to both the research and the personal anecdotes is a potent one.

Yes, there's an intrinsic messiness to the narrative and themes of Origin, but history, society, and individual lives are messy, too. Ultimately, the film brings us to some form of clarity in the optimistic notion that there might be only one answer to the connective tissue of caste: our shared, interconnected humanity in facing the uncertainties of life.

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