‘Origin’ is too ambitious for its own good

In adapting Isabel Wilkerson’s New York Times’ bestseller “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent,” Ava DuVernay has produced perhaps the most ambitious work of her career. But “Origin,” for all its stylistic verve, potent subject matter, and inventive approach, is a picture whose reach far exceeds its grasp. Wilkerson’s book has 496 pages to map the connection between racism in America, Nazi Germany, and the caste system in India. DuVernay’s film only has 145 minutes to do the same, with the added challenge of dramatizing the journey of grief Wilkerson endured through the experience of writing and researching it.

“Caste” is a dense and layered narrative with enough depth and nuance to power a multi-part documentary for streaming platforms, but instead, DuVernay has opted to, as the film’s opening introduction explains, “artistically interpret” Wilkerson’s text. The result is a film that is equal parts haunting tone poem, long-form lecture, harrowing personal tragedy, and, unfortunately, one of the most laughably on-the-nose discussions ever produced about America’s history of inequality. Many moments in the film solemnly encapsulate its difficult lessons into resonant, memorable imagery. But an equal number of moments could most charitably be described as the big-screen version of every white liberal’s social media feed from the summer of 2020.

In 2012, writer Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) was approached by a former editor (Blair Underwood) to pen a piece about Trayvon Martin’s death. In one scene, while Wilkerson listens in her study to the infamous 911 tapes from Martin’s extrajudicial killing, DuVernay stages a dramatic reenactment of his brutal slaying. But Wilkerson chooses not to take the assignment. 

The frustrations and fear Wilkerson feels at the moment hint at a deeper reservoir of thought around the phenomenon of police brutality, but those ideas go untapped as she extends her hiatus to take care of her ailing mother, Ruby (Emily Yancy.) But, once she loses her mother and her husband (Jon Bernthal) in quick succession, wrestling with her connections to both events leads her back down a path of wanting to understand why these things happen. “We call everything racism,” she asks. “Why?” 

Upon being prodded to explore all the open-ended ideas Trayvon Martin’s death brought to the fore, Wilkerson argues that she doesn’t write questions; she writes answers. So, while mourning those closest to her, Wilkerson works through a loose thesis tethering the history of Black subjugation in America to the plight of the Dalit people in India, hoping to draw meaningful conclusions about all the nebulous ills we reliably brush under the rug of race. But severe doubt sets in with her editors, peers, and, eventually, the audience about whether she can thread that narrow needle.

An overwrought dinner table discussion between Wilkerson and her German friend Sabine (Connie Nielsen) turns into a debate about which was worse, slavery or the Holocaust. The back-and-forth closely resembles the worst nesting-doll quote-tweet argument on the subject, but it spurs Wilkerson to find proof that the Nazis stole their entire playbook on how to dehumanize Jews from the American legal system. This smoking gun helps her through the film’s most effective act, laying out the foundation of her book, “The Eight Pillars of Caste,” and allowing the film’s dramatic climax to be a neat summation of the source material it was born from. But, along the road to that destination, DuVernay careens between tones and genre. Some scenes borrow text passages from the book as voice-over narration for dramatic interpretations of historical events. DuVernay centers the love story between August Landmesser (Fitt Winrock), the lone German refusing to do the Nazi salute from the famous 1936 photo, and his Jewish lover, Irma Eckler (Victoria Pedretti.) The relationship acts as a tether to Wilkerson’s own interracial marriage. 

Between those interludes, we’re repeatedly subjected to some of the blandest, most overt exchanges between Wilkerson and others. Perhaps the most egregious is a scene where she bonds with a right-wing plumber (Nick Offerman wearing a MAGA hat) over their shared parental loss. The way these interactions are written and staged feel less like affecting drama and more like deleted scenes from an after-school special. Each of these broad appeals of centrist kumbaya feels designed to counterbalance the film’s more challenging concepts. Still, all they do is muddy an already-too-intricate narrative. 

“Origin” is at its best when it focuses entirely on Wilkerson’s creative process and how it dovetails with her grief. Ellis-Taylor delivers sterling work in a quietly demanding lead role, both as the drama’s central figure and as the narrator of Wilkerson’s gorgeous prose. The film also intermittently shines when DuVernay throws a real Hail Mary and gives in to her urge to abstract all this pain and loss into a formless collage of image and sound bound entirely by emotion. 

There is a critical moment in the film where DuVernay chooses to dramatically cut from a scene where a Jewish prisoner at a concentration camp is being executed to a scene where George Zimmerman is killing Trayvon Martin. The juxtaposition is so affecting because it puts the viewer into Wilkerson’s mind. In the moment, the audience can feel how these disparate tragedies are connected, even if, on reflection, comparing the two seems ill-advised. But the glue stitching DuVernay’s many conflicting approaches together elicits little more than eye-rolling in the end.

“Origin” is a film that thinks it needs to be as blunt and exhaustive as possible to make its points clear and inalienable. “Caste” may be an effective read for anyone actively invested in bettering their understanding of inequality in the world, but “Origin” is a movie. The medium is uniquely disadvantaged as a delivery system for ideological rhetoric. The most cringeworthy and groan-inducing elements of the film seem to exist solely for an imaginary viewer who will likely never bother to watch it, much less ever seriously engage with the ideas it espouses. 

For those hungry for nourishing cinema about thorny topics, the picture might feel infantilizing in its attempts to change hearts and minds. After the nationwide reckoning with these concepts that many Americans had through the pandemic’s early days, anyone who still isn’t convinced of what is just will need some divine intervention, not another proselytizing motion picture from “the Hollywood elite.” 

“Origin” is most affecting when DuVernay gives life to Wilkerson’s internal struggles while writing “Caste.” It’s a shame that much of the runtime abdicates that worthy work to preach to those who have no interest in bearing witness.

“Origin” is currently playing at The Senator.