An education: "Origin"

The eminent film scholar David Bordwell may have passed last month, but pressing questions of film form linger on in his wake. Kaouther Ben Hania's recent Oscar nominee Four Daughters demonstrated - unintentionally, I suspect - how the hybrid commingling of drama and documentary can do as much to obscure as reveal the truth of any matter. Claire Simon's Our Body, by contrast, suggested old-school observational documentary craft remains as vital as ever to our understanding of ourselves and the world. Now we have Origin, in which Ava duVernay - a filmmaker with form in both drama (2014's Selma) and documentary (2016's 13TH) - sets out to film what she's described as "the biography of a book". The book is Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, a non-fiction bestseller of 2020 in which the Black academic and writer Isabel Wilkerson argued it was caste rather than race (and, a corollary, casteism rather than racism) that most closely governs how society operates. 

Arguably, Wilkerson was splitting hairs - that most academic of pastimes - but her theory pushed beyond skin colour in search of something more deeply rooted yet: the discontent that would explain both the white-on-white hatred of the Holocaust and contemporary anti-Semitism, and the brown-on-brown atrocities of latter-day India. Her fieldwork now yields a drama describing the process whereby Wilkerson (played in duVernay's film by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) - an observer as we join her, "on hiatus" in her own words - was first persuaded to put pen to paper or fingers to the keyboard, a mixed bag of circumstances that include the Trayvon Martin shooting, much bathtub and bedtime reading, the loss of her partner and mother in quick succession, and subsequent research trips to Berlin and Delhi. It is an unconventional way of approaching the material, to say the least. Non-fiction books such as Wilkerson's, steeped in theory and historical analysis, tend to generate non-fiction films; it would be neither inaccurate nor strictly a diss to describe duVernay's film as soap-adjacent. With that comes an element of creative jeopardy, for Origin risks interpretation not as a text on how we might collectively negotiate and resolve the issues under discussion, but something far more niche, borderline narcissistic: how a tenured Black creative - be that Wilkerson or duVernay or anyone with money enough to travel and test a theory - negotiates such issues. Could it be that Origin is less interested in how society is reformed and redeemed than in how publishing advances are earned?

Well, nope - or not entirely, and therein lies Origin's odd sort of success. Granted, duVernay's film may still be primarily of interest to writers, historians and the chattering classes. What we're watching is, after all, the construction of a grand unifying theory, an idea that might connect the Berlin of 1939 to Charlottesville in 2017. (The movie is A Beautiful Mind with hate crimes in place of equations.) Yet the risk pays off in scenes you wouldn't normally see in this kind of prestige statement drama: Wilkerson calling in a plumber (Nick Offerman, glowering under a MAGA cap) to fix a blocked pump, or attending cookouts with best pal Niecy Nash-Betts, a surrogate for those of us without an MA. The scene where Wilkerson first arrives in India may be the most accurate filming yet of what it is to be a Westerner arriving in India for the first time, but then, at all points, duVernay is interested in the ways theory gets developed, tested and refined in conversation with the wider world. A lot, then, depends on the writing, which is passionate, if every so often on the nose: as the inspirational ballad poured over the closing credits like treacle underlines, Origin was conceived not as a rigorous Straub-Huillet interrogation of our shared past, but rousing awards-season product, no viewer left behind. Yet scene-by-scene, the actors sold me on it, particularly Ellis-Taylor, who's been quietly excellent for a while (Ray, If Beale Street Could Talk, King Richard), and here really does seem to be pulling something notable together: a theory, a life, a way forward for her fellow man. 

If you find the film working for you in any way, it's almost certainly because duVernay prioritises human experience over the abstract and conceptual: what she's chosen to film is how the facts Wilkerson unearthed affect the characters, realising that that's what will most forcefully affect us in turn. This director holds to a sentimental view of history and class relations, but much as Wilkerson's theory can be boiled down to our old friends love and hate, concepts beyond colour, so too casteism invites description as irrational and emotive - an arbitrary imposition that arguably merits dramatising as much as it does documenting. In its second half, Origin alights upon a rather brilliant thesis: that just as hate spread across the world, from Jim Crow-era America to Nazi Germany and back to our Trump-haunted present, so too might love and resistance, much as the reformist Indian politician B.R. Ambedkar drew strength from the resilience of the African-Americans he observed on one U.S. trip. Within the narrow corridor of awards season 2023-24, this heartfelt, all-embracing film by a noted Black creative was clearly outmanoeuvred by a far cooler, more rigorous proposition by a middle-aged white bloke from North London, yet it struck me that both duVernay and Jonathan Glazer were working towards much the same goals of engagement and enlightenment. By going a funny way around, by refusing merely to stripmine its material for a rollcall of astonishing and/or alarming truths, Origin stands alone as a sort of prologue or prequel - its own origin story, directing us back towards the book and the possibility it holds of becoming better citizens in a kinder, more just society.

Origin is now playing in selected cinemas.