It’s not about race; it’s about caste — the system of injustice and subjugation that persists, generation from generation, resistant to the individuals who work to defy and shatter it.
So it is in Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 nonfiction study, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Released just two months after the murder of George Floyd, at a time when the U.S. racial reckoning displaced conversations of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Caste couldn’t have come at a better time. While so many searched for answers to how we got here, Wilkerson’s book didn’t just explain how we got here, she connected how so many others got here, too, and why we’re still here.
Steeped in dense research, Caste may be an unusual bestseller, but it is digestible, engaging and revelatory. Wilkerson’s study links India’s ancient social stratification with segregation in the United States, which, in turn, influenced the Nazis who engineered the holocaust in Europe.
Transforming that research into a dramatic narrative for the screen is no easy lift, which might explain why writer-director Ava DuVernay chose not to adapt Caste for her film Origin but instead decided to tell the story of Wilkerson writing the book.
DuVernay’s tactic isn’t unfounded — Wilkerson (played in the movie by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) weaves herself throughout Caste — though DuVernay’s employment of said scenes is curious. In one, a MAGA-hat-wearing plumber (Nick Offerman) visits Wilkerson’s flooded basement with as little help and as much disdain as possible. Then Wilkerson reaches out with sympathy and connects with the plumber. In the movie, the scene falls flat because it feels rushed and obligatory. In the book, the scene works because it illustrates how our souls yearn to connect even though the system tries to drive us apart.
Origin opens in 2012, two years after the Pulitzer Prize-winning author published The Warmth of Other Suns. Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost) has just been murdered in Florida, and Wilkerson’s colleagues urge her to write something about the incident, to use her voice to help everyone understand. Wilkerson defers. Writing is long and isolating work, and she has familial obligations that take precedence. Then, two deaths in quick succession leave Wilkerson with the wealth of the time it takes to write her book — not exactly a ringing endorsement for the loved ones of writers.
Wilkerson travels to Germany, to India, to the South. She reads books, talks to people, collects research. SSome scenes DuVernay visualizes with historical recreations full of somber music and melodramatic images to drive the emotion. In others, Wilkerson narrates while writing on her whiteboard or tapping away at her MacBook’s keyboard. It’s not scintillating cinema, but it does get the point across. DuVernay makes Wilkerson’s investigation convincing, and Ellis-Taylor’s face makes us care.
Adaptations are tricky things. Most of the time, financial incentives drive the project because a successful book brings in a built-in audience. How can you lose? For a select few, you don’t, and a successful book drives readers to see the movie. If the movie is good enough, it drives viewers back to the book.
I figure a lot of people who read Caste will want to see Origin, but I don’t know how many people will walk out of Origin and check out Caste. That’s a shame. Wilkerson’s book is one of the most memorable works I’ve encountered this decade. The movie? Not so much.
ON SCREEN: Origin opens in wide release Jan. 19.