‘Origin’ Review: Ava DuVernay’s Monumental Look at ‘Caste’ Frames America’s Most Difficult Conversation

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In “Origin,” Ava DuVernay weaves a centuries- and continents-spanning narrative feature around the ideas of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson, who rejects the word “racism.” It’s not that she doesn’t believe that racism exists; rather, she doesn’t think that racism alone can explain the inequity in human society — the way America’s founders could have written “all men are created equal” and meant something so different.

As Isabel Wilkerson, the protagonist (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who is based on Isabel Wilkerson, the author of “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” puts it to her editor (Blair Underwood), “Racism as the primary language to understand everything is insufficient.” And later, to her sister (Niecy Nash-Betts): “We have to consider oppression in a way that does not centralize race.” The book “Caste” was Wilkerson’s answer to that challenge, drawing connections between discrimination in the United States and how Nazi Germany invented a social hierarchy to justify the Holocaust, which she links in turn to the rigid system of caste in India. “Origin” is DuVernay’s ambitious yet accessible way of doing the same: questioning and contextualizing the way things are and how we got here.

Rather than adapting “Caste” directly (a task that would call for a documentary at least as enormous and wide-ranging as her monumental 2016 feature “The 13th”), DuVernay opts to focus on Wilkerson herself.

This may sound like a recipe for disaster. Imagine a series of “eureka” moments as the journalist brainstorms with editors, scours libraries and furrows her brow in front of her laptop en route to publishing her bestseller.