So... Selma was not a good film

One of the many carefully choreographed moments in Selma that work better as a still than as a scene in a film 

I don't remember cringing more in a movie theatre. Perhaps it was because I had some high expectations, and as I scan the internet for reviews I realize that perhaps this was shaped by the nearly universal acclaim for Selma. The reason that I told myself and others why I was excited to see this film, though, was DuVernay- the film's outspoken and inspiring director. This was a film that had a lot of hype surrounding it, but the only press that interested me was on DuVernay's fierce persona, especially in the face of detractors who alleged Selma did not shine a bright enough light on LBJ's efforts to win African Americans the right to vote. Now, I will admit that I am generally attracted to historical dramas to see how powerful stories about oppressed individuals or groups can be told or retold in the film format, so my position is generally biased towards films that portray the ugly side of (white) American history. So it would seem that, at the very least, Selma should satisfy these basic list items and could perhaps provide an interesting lens onto a history that I am reasonably familiar with.

While Selma managed to show, in graphic detail, the terror African Americans endured in South, why did it have to be so ham-fisted, so full of unnecessary melodrama (including the relentless use of string music), so riddled with sub-par performances by strong actors given wooden scripts and spotty scenes? These are the trappings of a film and a filmmaker unsure of their material- but what could be a more powerful and rich historical plot than the one covered by Selma? While in the theatre, my friend and I, trying to keep our distaste for yet another overly- choreographed scene to a quiet hush (the most offensive being Dylan Baker's laughable Hoover and the strategy in the living room scene), I thought about what, as a whole, was this film presenting me with that was so off-putting. I think I've come up with a tentative overarching conclusion that ties in all of my singular dislikes, and that is that each scene felt intentional and not in a good way. For instance, the 'strategy in the living room scene' sets the major SCLC players in a casual setting to discuss which aspects of the voting laws of the south King should take up first with the president. Like a bad cop drama/comedy, each character has their own neatly-scripted opinion, each flowing logically from the next and through this moment the audience is schooled in the various ways blacks in the south were disenfranchised. Nice and neat right? But such discussions would never have occurred in such a tidy fashion- and I'm not even talking about any specific historical instance, I'm speaking in generalities here. These scenes pervaded the film's entirety. I recall thinking: now this is the scene where we see how evil Hoover is, this next scene shows that there was tension between King and his wife Coretta, and now we're seeing how King sometimes doubted himself- check!

Selma gets the violence right, as it correctly shows how horrifying white police officers were in the South, as well as the oppressive structures that maintained their authority and furthermore, why, today, we should be questioning the notion that all-white police forces are devoid of racist prejudice. The rest of the film, however, played like a series of poorly or overly-orchestrated music videos... and the music was wretched.

Oh how convenient that the original GDubya is in the background of this particular scene