Appearances can be deceiving – so can revisionist history and films “based on” true stories. This photograph is beautiful, but the beautiful bridge in the photograph was the site of one of the ugliest and most pivotal racial confrontations in American history. This is the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Route 80 where it crosses the Alabama River in Selma.
It is also the primary landscape for Selma, the new film by Ava DuVerney. In 1964 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act banning discrimination in public accommodations and voter registration, but in order to ensure passage it was weak on enforcement and implementation. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement was building a coalition of organizations to bring pressure on Congress to pass a voting rights bill with teeth to enforce those rights. Lyndon Johnson agreed with the movement’s leadership on the need for such a bill, but was concerned that moving that legislation forward would galvanize the Southern Bloc in the Senate and endanger his larger War on Poverty agenda. This is the historical setting for DuVerney’s film as well as two plays by Seattle playwright, Robert Schenkkan, All The Way and The Great Society.
It is not clear to me why filmmakers and playwrights feel compelled to revise history in the telling of their stories. The conventional wisdom behind this artistic license is that a strict retelling of historical facts lacks drama and a little tweak here and there serves to enhance the tension and elevate the art. I disagree.
Tony Kushner and Stephen Spielberg changed the facts in the film Lincoln when they showed two Connecticut congressmen voting against the 13th Amendment when, in fact, the Connecticut delegation voted unanimously for passage. And DuVerney does it when she sets up LBJ as the foil for Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery. Wasn’t there enough tension in the air – and the country – to tell the story factually? Doesn’t LBJ’s caution about the physical danger and the threats to enacting successful voting rights legislation add enough weight to MLK’s decision to proceed in spite of the warning? The LBJ/MLK relationship was complex to say the least, but LBJ was not opposed, he just thought the action and the timing were incendiary. Several reviewers have called out the director.
There is an interesting discussion in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/selma-vs-selma in which the writer lays out the history of the screenplay itself. The original, by Paul Webb, written nine years ago showed a much different LBJ, but DuVernay apparently felt that Webb’s original fell into the category she calls the “white savior movies” where the oppressed black hero is saved by the white man, citing To Kill a Mocking Bird and Mississippi Burning as examples of the genre. Historians Robert Caro and Richard Dallek both support the view that LBJ was a strong supporter of MLK and the push for voting rights. If white savior movies are to be questioned, what about films that mischaracterize the white character to elevate the black protagonist?
I liked the film, but I was bothered by its portrayal of LBJ and the unseen but unabashed greed of MLK’s family. It seems that when the director approached the family for permission to use his own words in the film they put an exorbitant price on the rights and demanded creative control of his image. To Ms. DuVernay’s credit she declined. She wasn’t ready to allow a whitewash of Dr. King’s flaws, since they were also part of the story.Instead, speeches were written that echoed his tone but were not his actual words.
Notwithstanding the film’s flaws it did capture the time and feeling of the era. Robert Schenkkan’s plays tell the other side of the story by showing us the character of LBJ dealing with the same set of historical facts. His two plays show us a tragic character caught in between the opposing groundswells of trouble at home and trouble abroad. Civil rights vs. Vietnam.
The first play, All The Way, debuted on Broadway with Brian Cranston, fresh off the final installment of Breaking Bad, playing LBJ. It was a big hit on Broadway, and Schenkkan, a Seattle playwright, brought it and it’s companion piece, The Great Society, to Seattle in December. They were very good, fast paced, profanity laced theater pieces, and both the film and the plays were timely in view of the racial unrest in Ferguson, MO and New York. We’ve come a long way since 1965, but when the surfaces are scratched the underlying stress and distrust between black and white rise quickly to the surface.
Do you remember LBJ, MLK, Hubert Humphrey, RFK, Stokely Carmichael, Ralph Abernathy, J Edgar Hoover, Everett Dirksen, and Strom Thurmond? If you do you might have been disturbed by the casting of both the play and movie, as I was. Those of us of a certain age have indelible impressions of the faces and voices of these players, and when they are represented we want to see reasonable facsimiles of the originals. Both the film and the play failed us in the casting. Hubert Humphrey was the “happy warrior” but he wasn’t slight or wimpy. J Edgar Hoover was jowly, chunky and evil not small, taciturn, and evil. At least they got the evil part, if not the uptight, closeted, queer part. Stokely Carmichael was very handsome as was Andrew Young while Dirksen was mannered and stately. Some of the actors were better than others. The LBJ and MLK actors were not perfect representations but they were good at their portrayals. Critics are getting some mileage out of the fact that the two leading characters in the film are played by English actors – David Oyelowo and Tom Wilkinson. Aren’t there American actors that would have been as good?
There is always something uncanny about the timing of films that mirror the contemporary scene and remind us that change is slow and difficult. Themes are recurring; 50 years after Brown vs. Board of Education and the Selma march there are racially charged demonstrations over the shooting of a black teenager by a white police officer in Ferguson and 75 years after the Holocaust there is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in France, Belgium and Germany. Hollywood does provide a service by reminding us that bigotry, intolerance, and inequality are not far beneath the surface. I think it is legitimate to question why history has to be revised in order to be artful, but I applaud the motives of the filmmakers – to remind us of our history and our aspirations.
I’m not sure to what extent the portrayal of LBJ was accurate (having read at this point only one of the Caro biographies), but you have to admit that the character as played by Jack Willis was absolutely riveting.