Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 141 minutes
Release Date: December 8th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Neon
Director(s): Ava DuVernay
Writer(s): Ava DuVernay / Isabel Wilkerson (book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)

The cracks won’t fix themselves. Any more deterioration is on our watch.

Rather than create a documentary based on Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste or a straight biopic on the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, Ava DuVernay decided to do both. Origin is therefore a way into the material by dramatizing the journey Wilkerson took to find, research, and articulate it. How did the idea for the book arrive? (A pitch from her former editor to cover the Trayvon Martin murder.) How did caste’s connections and separations from racism pop into her mind? (Conversations with her Black mother and white husband.) We’re experiencing Isabel’s enlightenment right as she in turn enlightens us.

It’s an ingenious approach to simultaneously educate and entertain. Some of it works better than the rest (moments when other characters teach or debate feel very heavy-handed by virtue of distilling what was probably hours of dialogue into a few concise lines stripped of all organic spontaneity), but you cannot deny the power of the whole when those more lecture hall passages are put into context with the authentic human drama of the rest. Because there’s a lot of pain and loss on-screen that spans decades. It might not all be the same, but a through line is shared.

The non-fiction reenactments are crucial to breathing life into those more academic scenes of voiceover where Wilkerson (beautifully played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) starts drawing her lines between slavery, the Holocaust, and Indian Dalits. There’s Allison and Elizabeth Davis (Isha Blaaker and Jasmine Cephas Jones) infiltrating the Jim Crow south as clandestine investigative journalists. August Landmesser (Finn Wittrock) and Irma Eckler’s (Victoria Pedretti) forbidden love in Nazi Germany. And Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar (Gaurav J. Pathania), a Dalit hero whose statues are caged so as to ward off vandalism from higher castes.

To watch them—even from a distance as teaching tools more than characters—is to help understand the lessons of their lives. They also work to circle back to Wilkerson herself and her career as a journalist, marriage to a white man (Jon Bernthal’s Brett), and proximity to both white and Black cultural institutions via generational and professional avenues. How does she navigate the overlap? How can she get her mother (Emily Yancy) and cousin (Niecy Nash) to understand racism is a product of this larger issue of caste? How does she get a MAGA plumber (Nick Offerman) to see her inherent humanity above her skin color?

Your enjoyment might hinge on your tastes where it comes to cinema as a result. There are some very “documentary-style” scenes where Isabel is interviewing people (Audra McDonald’s Miss Hale or a man who played little league with Al Bright) or coming to an academic epiphany by way of explaining to a friend. Some might find them jarring when compared to Wilkerson’s own trajectory as a woman watching everyone she loves die, but it does all fit together. It speaks to giving voice to experiences and evolving to reinterpret them through a new lens.

In the end it’s all really about empathy and power. It’s Wilkerson using her personal narrative to point out the ways in which so much of the hate in this world is predicated on man-made conventions of manufactured superiority for the benefit of the ruling class’s continued prosperity regardless of how those conventions are ultimately carried out. Until we open our eyes and understand that we are all human and thus worthy of dignity, this millennia-old cycle of oppression and systemic compartmentalization will never cease to be.

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Jon Bernthal and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in ORIGIN; courtesy of Neon.