http://m.nationalreview.com/article/395306/whites-only-armond-white
Ava DuVernay’s Selma makes a valiant attempt to snatch back the 1960s Civil Rights Movement from Hollywood — the filmmaking institution that has lately used America’s racial history for its own white liberal self-aggrandizement. (Who can forget the throwback image of British director Steve McQueen jumping Jim Crow at this year’s Oscars?) But the problem with Selma is that it’s a Hollywood movie at heart. DuVernay does the same foreshortening of history seen in such recent films as The Great Debaters, The Help and The Butler. Though less egregious than those, Selma doesn’t find a distinctive tone; it’s similarly self-congratulatory.

Opening on Martin Luther King and his wife Coretta as they dress up to receive his 1965 Nobel Peace Prize, DuVernay does a couple interesting but curious things: She establishes a glamorous sexy vibe between these African American dignitaries and recreates a moment of their renown. Not that Selma needs to begin with the grassroots incidents that inspired the famous March from Selma to the Alabama state capital Montgomery — one of several events that galvanized the movement — but it’s unclear where DuVernay is headed with this sequence of familiar events. By first going for the gold, DuVernay seems to opt for celebrity over history. Though titled Selma, the film settles for being the Martin Luther King Show.

To start with Nobel recognition keeps Selma within the shadow of Official (white liberal) approval rather than portraying the movement in terms of authentic domestic (meaning American and African-American) values and goals. DuVernay’s best efforts seem impersonal but probably aren’t, because much of black American history is still seen through the hegemony of those who control the media’s image of black people. These days, few filmmakers are willing to complicate typical black movie stereotypes, even when the stereotypes are “dignified.” DuVernay’s background as a publicist suggests that she may not know the difference.

Immediately following the Nobel sequence, DuVernay segues into another flashback, this time an idyllic scene of little black girls descending a staircase gleefully discussing Coretta Scott King’s fashion sense. A sudden explosion blows the children into the air like dolls floating in slow-motion. (A recreation of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four black girls.) At this point, Selma’s hop-scotch narrative from Stockholm to Birmingham to Selma to Washington, D.C. looks like a collection of the Movement’s Greatest Hits (pardon the expression). DuVernay is telling a very well-known story in an overly familiar way — rubbing soft spots (brutalized children, women and white Northerners allying with the Movement) and sore spots (the 1965 murders of Jimmie Lee Johnson and Viola Liuzzo) rather than making meaning.

Not a single scene in Selma seems felt. Every plot turn is a nudge — and a boast — intended to remind viewers of a golden history to which they can easily lay claim. Some will argue that this is necessary in order to enlighten generations who may be ignorant of that history, but the problem is that slick familiarization prevents them from understanding the complexities of the past. And they don’t properly earn it — to borrow a term from Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.

Think back to the scene in Spielberg’s 1985 The Color Purple (Hollywood’s foremost black female melodrama, which at one time widely repudiated but has since won rightful bonafides from a popular audience holding fast against disdainful critical fad and responding to the film with pure feeling and genuine affirmation). One of The Color Purple’s many memorable moments showed Oprah Winfrey as the prideful heavyset black Southern woman Sofia being slapped by a white sheriff and socking back; she ends up pistol-whipped, knocked out in the middle of a dusty street, the wind blowing her dress to pathetically expose her underwear. The humanizing details are part of the scene’s artistry and powerful effect. But in Selma, Winfrey’s appearance as Annie Mae Johnson, the voting rights activist who was brutalized and arrested by Alabama police, merely seems routine. It uses Oprah’s sanctimonious certitude that reenacting Johnson’s story (and the right to vote) is sufficient, even though these flashes of Johnson’s life are less compelling than that painful flash of panties. Spielberg’s image of underwear and an uncovered large brown thigh coexists with national memory of those formally-dressed black Americans who were beaten and hosed-down and attacked by dogs while petitioning. It’s what film scholars would call a synecdoche, symbolizing something deeper than Sofia’s wounded flesh and insulted pride; calling upon one’s own shame and inspiring compassion. Less ingenious replays of violence — tendentious representations of “history”–don’t stick in the memory but merely win a cursory response.

Noting Selma’s lack of imaginative power isn’t to slam DuVernay but to point out basic standards by which we can rightfully view movies — especially films about race, a subject that is rarely well executed. Selma is part of a Hollywood movement that easily exploits race through the eagerness of filmmakers and audiences to claim “the right side of history.” Viewers of The Help, The Butler and Selma are encouraged to profess an inheritance they do not earn merely from watching a superficial Civil Rights Best-Of reel.