Selma has a movie that will leave many audience members clapping as the film concludes. It’s a feel-good movie and an important one for all generations to see. Older generations may have forgotten some of the critical details over the years. Younger generations may be exposed to this for the first time, or at least for the first time outside of a textbook or one of those dry 45-minute, made-for-education documentaries. I am happy this movie received a PG-13 rating rather than an R rating. It is an essential movie for everyone to see. I will not ever cheer or hoot and holler at the end of a movie. That isn’t my style. I was talking with my mom the other day, and she said people stood and clapped at the end of Unbroken. I found Unbroken to be one of the most overrated, bland movies. Selma certainly isn’t that, and I was happy there were some cheers at the end of this movie.

I think I’m just seeing it at a time in my life when, outside of a select few movies (including none in 2014, still some hope for American Sniper, though), I am just not going to be moved by the same things that a typical audience might be. My favorite movies these days are dark, psychological thrillers (Foxcatcher), movies about relationships gone wrong (Blue Valentine, Take This Waltz, Revolutionary Road, All the Real Girls), or about overcoming diversity to find a way (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Painted Veil). So, just where I was with my mental state, I had had a mental block going in. I was confident I would like the movie, but I was by no means ready to see it win all these Academy Awards, for which it would likely receive nominations. The nominations it will receive. The wins could become hard to find.

Let’s start with the lead performance. David Oyelowo (Lee Daniels’ The Butler, A Most Violent Year) nailed it as Martin Luther King. This is a career-defining performance and, likely, the pinnacle of his career. I certainly hope not, but that’s how great he was. It really felt like you were watching King on screen in a similar way, where you thought you saw Abraham Lincoln on screen in the movie Lincoln. I did watch Malcolm X a few weeks ago, and I thought it was a little better than Selma. There was more character development in the Denzel Washington film, but as good as Washington was, you never could get past the fact that it was Washington on screen. With Selma, most people had never heard of or remembered Oyelow. He definitely had this working in his favor. I believe I have yet to list my five nominees for Best Actor (which is rather annoying, since the Academy Awards will be announced a couple of days before I have a chance to see American Sniper and, in particular, Bradley Cooper). His performance will be outstanding, and I will end up with seven candidates to whittle down to five spots. Oyelow did best when King offered his thoughts and feelings through his nonverbal cues. He was a man of peace and long-term vision. This is where he differed from Malcolm X (though I think I now view Malcolm X much more positively after watching Spike Lee’s movie). I prefer peace over conflict, so I appreciated the approach that Martin Luther King took.

So the movie follows King’s life for three months in the summer of 1965. King and his supporters are trying to secure voting rights in Alabama, a place that is violently opposed to letting black people have the same rights as them. Blacks who legally had the right to vote were turned down simply because they were black. In the film’s second scene, Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey) goes to submit her voter registration application. A clerk denies her at the courthouse and first asks her to recite the Preamble of the US Constitution, which she does. She is then asked how many sitting judges there were in Alabama, and she does so. She is then asked to name them, an impossible question to answer. Even if she had memorized the names, the clerk would have just asked her an even more difficult question. He was going to make sure she got her application rejected no matter what. Though the ratification of the 15th Amendment (almost a century before this movie takes place), poll taxes, literacy tests, and various other unfair practices kept a huge majority of blacks (some 98% in Alabama) from voting.

King, tired of seeing this, decides to take his cause to Selma, Alabama. This is where most of the movie takes place, although there are a handful of scenes in Washington, D.C., between King and President Lyndon B Johnson (Tom Wilkinson – Michael Clayton, In the Bedroom). King consistently urges President Johnson to do his job and make it easier for Black Americans to register to vote. But Johnson doesn’t want to make that a priority. Instead, he focuses more on the Vietnam War and helping people experiencing poverty than on voting rights. This is unsatisfactory to King, so he and his supporters set up shop in Selma with the eventual plan to march to Montgomery, the state capital of Alabama, to publicize their inability to vote. King hopes that national awareness will lead to increased legislation, specifically some voting rights acts that would eliminate tests and taxes to keep people who should be allowed to vote from voting.

Now I know I’m in the minority when I say I didn’t love this movie. I liked it. And even though I didn’t know the exact details of these marches, I learned a great deal about MLK going into this film. And while this film had much more drama than the very flat Unbroken, I wasn’t moved as I thought I would be. Now, when you see this movie and say that you thought it had plenty of drama, I’m not going to argue (I would argue against you if you said the same thing for Unbroken). I could see people reacting to Selma in entirely different ways. Some will be moved, and some might think they didn’t learn much that they didn’t already know. I hope that the movie moves you as it was designed to do. As I mentioned in my first paragraph, my head isn’t currently where it usually is, and this may be why I didn’t rate it quite as highly as so many others did. Director Ava DuVernay (Life Itself, Middle of Nowhere) directed a movie that honors its protagonist and tells an important story with dignity. I never felt that a scene was too difficult to watch, but a few were tough. Once again, I am glad this was a PG-13 movie so that younger people in our country can watch it sooner rather than later.

Plot 9/10 (Albeit a pivotal part of King’s life, the march from Selma to Montgomery felt a little limiting to me. You had the pieces in place for a slightly larger story here…I didn’t want an entire biopic, but this seemed like it wasn’t enough)
Character Development 8.5 (probably a few too many main characters, and they don’t change throughout the movie…maybe they did and didn’t get enough screen time)
Character Chemistry 9/10 (similar to my statement above…just a little hard to get chemistry when there are so many different characters trying to be showcased)
Acting 9.10 (it was legit. Oyelow gave the performance of his career…Wilkson was great…Ejogo and Winfrey were perfectly cast…and I’ve always been a fan of Wendell Pierce…though he tends to play a similar character in most of his movies.
Screenplay 9/10 (Paul Webb COULD grab the final nomination for best original screenplay)
Directing 8.5/10 (DuVernay won’t win, but a nomination is in order here…She’s on the cusp at 5 or 6, but she’s the only woman even being considered in the top 10 (sorry, Angelina Jolie, but Unbroken was just a miss)…I think DuVernay gets the final nod, and this would be much deserved.
Cinematography 9/10 (I did like the back and forth between the acted scenes and the shots of what was happening back in the 1960s)
Sound 9/10
Hook and Reel 8.5 (a little slow for me…I never felt bored, but it was slow and not really in a methodical way, which I am more appreciative of)
Universal Relevance 10/10 (everyone should see this…it’s an important movie for young and old…I liked the PG-13 rating…I believe this film would be great for a high school US History class)
90.5%

A-

Movies You Might Like If You Liked This Movie

• • Malcolm X
  • Lee Daniels’ The Butler
  • Suffragette 
  • Fruitvale Station
  • Hidden Figures