And that is essentially Selma’s greatest strength. Though it was sold largely as a biopic, with the emphasis being on King, a significant portion of the film focuses on the myriad figures that made up the Civil Rights Movement, from strong-willed individuals like activist Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey), who, in a heart-breaking early scene, is thwarted from registering to vote by a bigoted city official who simply makes up requirements until she cannot meet one, to John Lewis (Stephan James) and James Forman (Trai Byers), two young members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who disagreed on the importance of King’s role. The breadth of the film’s scope is impressive in this regard, as it manages to sketch in the enormity and diversity of the movement without being spread too thin. The film manages to balance the interpersonal dynamics with the larger historical moments, particularly the three attempted marches, the first of which ends in bloody violence as a small army of state troopers, local police officers, and deputized volunteers brutally attack the peaceful marchers as they attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. DuVernay handles the intensity of these moments of violence quite well, although at times she gives in too much to an aestheticizing impulse that draws undue attention to the technique, rather than the visceral, emotional impact of the moment.

Of course, Selma is still very much a film about Martin Luther King, Jr., who is played quite effectively by British actor David Oyelowo (A Most Violent Year), especially in the way he captures King’s oratory power without the benefit of his actual words (all the film’s speeches were written by DuVernay to circumvent copyright issues). Oyelowo recreates the familiar, melodic cadence of King’s speech and looks enough like him not to be distracting, although there were times I wished he had loosened up a bit and allowed us to see the man more fully in his less guarded moments. Oyelowo has a tendency to play King as constantly dignified, so that even when he’s cracking a joke or arguing with his wife, he feels stately and grand, a monument-in-the-making. That being said, Selma does not shy away from King’s flaws (it is not incidental that it opens with a close-up of King in private conversation, rather than behind a podium), particularly in a tense sequence in which his wife, Coretta (Carmen Ejogo), quietly confronts him about his extramarital affairs, of which she is clearly well aware. It’s a painful, intimate moment, and Ejogo plays Coretta’s mixture of indignity and sadness and fear with great power; she is, without doubt, the film’s strongest asset.

Less effective is Selma’s overall pace, which at times feels too rigid. There is always difficulty in adapting such familiar historical material, as the film is constantly at risk of simply hitting all the necessary beats and offering no real surprises. To counter this, Webb and DuVernay made the controversial decision to rewrite some aspects of history, particularly the relationship between King and President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), who the film portrays as being more impediment to the passage of a bill ensuring blacks’ voting rights than an asset. Unfortunately, this particular use of dramatic license backfires, not only because it supplies ammunition to critics looking for faults and historical distortions, but because it was fundamentally unnecessary. King and the civil rights organizers had plenty of antagonists against which they struggled—FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker), Alabama governor George Wallace (Tim Roth), Department of Public Safety director Al Lingo (Stephen Root), local sheriff Jim Clark (Tim Houston), and even Malcolm X (Nigel Thatch), to name a few—so adding one more was simply not necessary. The scenes between Dr. King and President Johnson are all dramatically effective in their own way, but they would have worked just as well had they adhered closer to the historical record, which would have allowed more emphasis on the ground-level difficulties the organizers endured.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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