Movie Review: ORIGIN

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: December 8th, 2023 / 03:00 AM

Rating: PG-13
Stars: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jon Bernthal, Niecy Nash-Betts, Emily Yancy, Finn Wittrock, Victoria Pedretti, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Isha Blaaker, Vera Farmiga, Audra McDonald, Connie Nielsen, Blair Underwood, Myles Frost, Nick Offerman, Suraj Yengde
Writer: Ava DuVernay, inspired by the book CASTE: THE ORIGINS OF OUR DISCONTENTS by Isabel Wilkerson
Director: Ava DuVernay
Distributor: Neon
Release Date: December 8, 2023 (New York, Los Angeles); January 19, 2024 (wide release)

ORIGIN is a respectful chronicle of both author Isabel Wilkerson’s nonfiction book CASTE: THE ORIGINS OF OUR DISCONTENTS, and of Wilkerson’s life and research surrounding her writing of the project. Director/screenwriter Ava DuVernay has crafted a film that is informative and occasionally touching, but also a little bit shapeless.

ORIGIN opens with a young Black man happily talking on his cell phone to his girlfriend. Then he goes into a convenience store, buys a can of tea and some Skittles, pulls up his hoodie, and we realize this is Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost).

Then we’re introduced to Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, whose first book, THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: THE EPIC STORY OF AMERICA’S GREAT MIGRATION, has made the nonfiction bestseller lists.

One of Isabel’s former editors, Amari Selvan (Blair Underwood), is so eager for her to write about Trayvon Martin’s murder that he provides her with the 911 tape of the incident.

Disturbed and intrigued, Isabel is nevertheless hesitant to return to journalism instead of writing another book. She is also concerned about the health of her mother Ruby (Emily Yancy). Isabel’s husband Brett (Jon Bernthal) is supportive, but feels that perhaps Isabel is using family concerns as an excuse to avoid getting back to work.

Isabel endures several tragedies, then goes to visit friends in Germany, where she gets into an argument with a German Jew (Connie Nielsen) about whether or not American racism and the history of slavery are comparable to the Holocaust.

Finally, Isabel embarks on gathering information for the book that will become CASTE. She uncovers a more direct connection between American racism and segregation and Nazi ideology than we might have known about, as well as centuries-long discrimination against the Dalit caste in India.

Isabel and her circle, including her spouse, her mom, her wisecracking cousin Marion (Niecy Nash-Betts), her friend Miss Hale (Audra McDonald), and even editor Amari, are played and depicted with great warmth. This helps make conversations that are pretty expository go down smoothly, feeling like human interaction instead of sets of facts.

We also get flashbacks to an investigation of racism in the American South of the 1930s, a meeting of Nazi officials, and the plight of a family targeted by the Nazis. Oddly, we don’t get a comparable flashback about the Dalits, perhaps because it would require more set-up and context than the rest. (Films and television have developed a shorthand in depicting American racism and Nazi anti-Semitism.)

ORIGIN toggles between being a character study of Isabel, making discoveries with her, and discussing those discoveries. What she finds will be more revelatory to some viewers than to others, but it’s all worthy subject matter.

Ellis-Taylor elicits a lot of sympathy and seems properly astute and scholarly, and we enjoy spending time with Yancy, Bernthal, Nash-Betts, McDonald and more.

But in moving from the 911 tape, to Isabel and her mom at a retirement home, to Natchez, Mississippi, to Berlin, to India, around and back, we don’t feel a sense of momentum. Segments often don’t lead into each other; they’re just presented to us as having relatively equal weight.

Also, while the actual process of conversing with others seems to have a healing effect on Isabel, she doesn’t seem impacted by it. She’s acquired facts, but we’re not really sure how (or even if) she’s different at the end than at the beginning. If she’s unchanged, it’s valid, but doesn’t provide much momentum.

ORIGIN is done well, it engages us and sometimes even educates. It just doesn’t always feel like a movie.

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A character study and dramatized investigation of discrimination

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