Ava DuVernay’s Origin is a fascinating drama, but it should have been a documentary

polygon.com:

Ava DuVernay is an accomplished dramatic director who knows how to craft a human story around a crusading idea without letting one overwhelm the other. She proved that with 2014’s Selma, her Martin Luther King Jr. biopic concentrating on the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights marches. But DuVernay is also a documentarian: Her fiery Netflix film 13th, about the prison-industrial complex, proved she doesn’t need the comforting accoutrements of story and character to help her make a powerful point.

These two sides of the director tussle for control of Origin, an ambitious adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s nonfiction bestseller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The movie, which chronicles the personal tragedies of Wilkerson’s life as she conceives and researches the book, is an awkward hybrid of these two approaches, neither of which fully succeeds. It’s a drama that wants to be a documentary, and it’s at its best when it’s just reeling off Wilkerson’s fascinating ideas at full flow.

The movie starts with Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, drifting in a personal limbo after publishing her first book. She’s happily married, and her husband, Brett (Jon Bernthal), is a practical rock and a smart sounding board for her ideas. But she’s struggling with the decision to move her mother, Ruby (Emily Yancy), into a nursing home, and she’s avoiding taking up a new project. Keen to get her writing again, her editor suggests she look into the killing of Trayvon Martin. The case stirs something in Wilkerson: a counterintuitive, almost ornery urge to look past pure racism as an explanation.

The book that eventually emerges is Caste, which seeks to recontextualize American racism and the Black American experience as aspects of a caste system — a millennia-old phenomenon of human society that can, and often does, operate entirely independently of race. Wilkerson finds links and commonalities between