Review: Ava DuVernay artfully blends documentary and biopic in 'Origin'

In many ways, the ambitious and boundary-pushing "Origin" feels like a culmination, of sorts, of the lines of inquiry that filmmaker Ava DuVernay has been chasing for some time, including the biopic "Selma" and the documentary "13th."

She tackles similar questions while adapting the nonfiction book "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents," by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson, who links the U.S., Nazi Germany and India, arguing structural inequalities have been legally, institutionally and violently enforced.

But DuVernay is not content to simply put Wilkerson's book to the screen in a talking heads-style documentary format. Rather, "Origin" is a biopic, contextualizing these concepts not in an anonymized vacuum, but within the lived experience of a Black female genius, the woman who birthed this theory into the world.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Wilkerson, who is initially reluctant to tackle America simply through the lens of race and racism. She's pushed to write something about the tragic death of Trayvon Martin by various editors (Blair Underwood and Vera Farmiga) but the concepts they pitch her are too shallow and facile. Yet, she can't stop thinking about Martin, and about his murderer George Zimmerman, who deputized himself to police and execute the teenager.

In the wake of personal tragedy, Wilkerson can't shake these questions, especially as she mourns her late husband, Brett (Jon Bernthal), a white man who often used his social power to advocate for her, and her late mother (Emily Yancy), who was entrenched in the Jim Crow-era belief that Black people should always be polite and deferential to white folks. Isabel also has the nagging feeling that this isn't just an American issue, or a race issue.

It's a challenge to animate this kind of nonfiction work, which is essentially a critical theory of humanity, and DuVernay takes a multipronged approach. Sometimes Isabel explains her theories to her sister (Niecy Nash-Betts) or friends and colleagues who either push back on her theories (Connie Nielsen) or offer their own experiences (Audra McDonald). Through every conversation, she refines her thinking, pushing deeper into the research.

What she uncovers is illustrated in flashbacks, such as the forbidden relationship between a German man, August Landmesser (Finn Wittrock), and German Jewish woman, Irma Eckler (Victoria Pedretti), in Nazi Germany.

DuVernay skillfully manages all of these stories by framing them within Isabel's experience of discovery and articulation. She knows there's a connection to be made, and we watch her draw the strings together, culminating in a powerful sequence combining Wilkerson's words with a soul-rending montage of imagery from the examples that she utilizes for the basis of her theory.

At the center is always Isabel, processing the anecdotes and evidence, bearing witness, translating through her own experience and taking in new information, whether it's in a Berlin research library or during an interaction with a plumber in a MAGA hat (Nick Offerman). Ellis-Taylor is luminous, soulful and sorrowful as Isabel, working through her own grief, and makes it look easy, even effortless.

Isabel's favorite metaphor is of America as an old house, one we ourselves didn't build but that we have to repair and renovate. It's a deeply resonant message, and perhaps one that only lands with DuVernay fully embracing the nearly experimental nature of this project that blends documentary and biopic.

She tackles this global story and existential idea with a certain necessary fearlessness, but more than anything, she brings heart, hope, and above all, humanity to this singular and searing text.

'Origin'

Rated: PG-13 for thematic material involving racism, violence, some disturbing images, language and smoking.