Review: 'Origin' blends biography and political theory into a potent story of a writer digging into the common thread of oppression

History lessons, let alone political science treatises, don’t often make for good drama — which makes the work writer-director Ava DuVernay pulls off in the intensely emotional and forcefully relevant “Origin” something of a miracle.

DuVernay attempts to adapt author Isabel Wilkerson’s nonfiction book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” which details how different forms of oppression throughout history — including the racism against African Americans in the United States, the systematic subjugation and murder of Jews by the Nazis, and the generations of stratified society in India — all had a common root: The idea of caste, that one group of people could set themselves above another group, and then manipulate laws and society to keep those groups unequal.

To describe this, though, DuVernay does not make a documentary. (She has before, and brilliantly, in “The 13th,” which showed how the carceral system was slavery codified in the constitutional amendment that otherwise outlawed slavery.) DuVernay instead imparts the lessons of “Caste” by showing us how the book came to be.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Wilkerson, who is introduced as a journalist who has left behind a career in short-form writing — newspaper articles and magazine essays — for writing books. But her friends and former editors often try to entice her to come back and comment on current events. In 2012, the current event people want Wilkerson to write about is the death of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old Black kid who was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, who reportedly thought Martin shouldn’t have been in that Florida subdivision.

Thinking about Trayvon — and the fact that Zimmerman was Hispanic, not white — gets Wilkerson considering that something is at work that’s deeper than simply racism. What about societies where the oppressed group was the same “race” as their oppressors, such as Jews in Germany, or the Dalits in India?

Wilkerson’s research takes her — and DuVernay takes her crew — to Germany and India, meeting scholars and advocates who help illuminate the thesis she’s forming. She also learns the stories, like the Harvard-trained researchers, a Black couple and a white couple, who embedded themselves in 1950s Alabama to document the insidious ways racism poisoned all facets of life. 

Her research is intercut with the tragedies in Wilkerson’s own life, including the decision to put her mother (Emily Yancy) in a nursing home, and the sudden death of her husband, Brett Hamilton (Jon Bernthal). Wilkerson carries on, understanding on a gut level that this thesis is important, and can perhaps explain something true and underlying about so much of what’s wrong in the world.

DuVernay also drops little truth bombs along the way, like how her German friend Sabine (Connie Nielsen), living in a country that has banned Nazi symbolism, can’t fathom why Americans still glorify the losers of the Confederacy — or, more harrowingly, how Nazi lawyers looked at America’s Jim Crow laws as a template for using laws to dehumanize Jews.

Carrying us through the story is Ellis-Taylor’s soulful, lived-in performance. She captures Wilkerson’s heartache at the loss of her loved ones and her determination to see the project through.

It would be easy for “Origin” to become a dry, pedantic dissertation. But DuVernay illuminates the narrative with historic examples of heroism, deploying a cast that includes Finn Wittrock as a German dissenter and Jasmine Cephas Jones as a witness to atrocities on both sides of the Atlantic. Not every moment works perfectly — there’s a scene with Nick Offerman in a MAGA hat that lands with a thud — but the bulk of the film resonates with equal measures of pain, grief and resilience.

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‘Origin’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 2, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving racism, violence, some disturbing images, language and smoking. Running time: 141 minutes.