Review Selma Is the Film of the Year  But 1965 or 2014
Correction appended Jan. 12, 2015, "I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy," said Lyndon Johnson, in his nationally televised address to a joint session of Congress on March 15, 1965. "At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.", The President was referring to the "Bloody Sunday" confrontation in Selma, Ala. on March 7, when Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark and his deputies met about 600 peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge with nightsticks, tear gas and charging horses. The naked brutality of this assault  just nine days after the young, unarmed black Baptist minister Jimmie Lee Jackson had died from an Alabama State Trooper's gunshot  spurred LBJ to bring the Voting Rights Act to Congress. A Texas Democrat who knew his party could lose the South for decades if he championed equal rights for blacks, Johnson nonetheless boldly declared, "There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem.", His comments reverberate eerily today, when police again can kill unarmed black men and face no legal punishment  and when the Voting Rights Act, which Johnson signed on August 6, 1965, with Martin Luther King Jr. Rosa Parks and John Lewis by his side, gets effectively defanged 48 years later by the Supreme Court. So Ava DuVernay's Selma, a vivid retelling of the months leading up to the three historic marches from Selma to Birmingham, carries a message that has lost none of its heroic, tragic relevance. If not quite in quality then certainly in import and impact, this is the film of the year  of 1965 and perhaps of 2014. The film, currently playing on 19 screens in New York and Los Angeles, opens in the rest of the country January 9  the week before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. This solid, expertly managed drama, with its stark images of good men standing up to entrenched government evil, has earned critical hosannahs and could be the breakout favorite among year-end contenders for the Academy Award. With Oscar night falling on February 22, just two days before the 50th anniversary of Jimmie Lee Jackson's death, Selma could be propelled to a Best Picture win as much by the Academy members' political consciences as by the film's undeniable power. It's creepy even to speculate about this, but one more unjustified police killing of an unarmed black could assure the movie of an Oscar sweep for Picture, for David Oyelowo as King in the Best Actor category and for DuVernay, who would become the first black woman chosen as Best Director. Dr. King would appreciate that awful conundrum that violence can be a goad to good. In Georgia, he had attempted voter-registration drives that, as NPR critic Bob Mondello noted, "received little media coverage because the authorities there had met nonviolent protests with nonviolence." Alabama promised more fertile ground for telegenic confrontation. Its Governor, the pint-size pit bull George Wallace, had proclaimed, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever!" Would Wallace be rooting this year's University of Alabama top-ranked football squad, dominated by black players? And Jim Clark's rambunctious police force was a good bet to be rough on pacifist marchers with dark faces. King, no less than the video newshound played by Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler, knew the dictum of editors in the nation's press and TV news If it bleeds, it leads. King wasn't a cynic or a sadist he was a political realist. And Selma, from a cogent, concise script by the British screenwriter Paul Webb, is all about realpolitik in the service of social idealism. In his March 15 speech, Johnson said he had summoned the Special Session of Congress in response to "the cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people." Yet his understanding of the urgent need for a Voting Rights Act was sown in secret meetings between the President Tom Wilkinson and the preacher. Johnson knew, from King's August 1963 March on Washington, that the Rev. Dr. was not just the eloquent voice of the civil rights movement he was, in showbiz terms, its director and impresario.