There is a lot of risk for being vocal about injustice. The louder you yell, the more attention you will get, and it’s not always from the desired forces. It’s true that when dealing with concepts like racism, you want to reach the federal level, making a radical change that gives every human the basic rights that they were born with. While America in a lot of ways has shifted from more limiting structures, groups like the Black Lives Matter movement constantly serve as a reminder that we’ve got a ways to go. There is a need to harp on matters until everyone can walk down the street without fear of being assaulted for misdemeanor crimes, or simply looking the wrong way in public.
To go back even further, there is a reason that the 1960s have remained one of the most discussed eras of racial division. Before the Civil Rights movement sought to get the basic freedoms, there was animosity between whites and blacks, where the south was still segregated and to drink from certain faucets was to wind up bruised and battered. Some take for granted that things changed, where sitting at a white diner would cause you to be pelted with food and called things that would traumatize the weak. The quest for human decency hasn’t been pretty, but the amazing changes made during this decade are worthy of immortalizing, reflecting bravery that is starting to be seen again, giving protestors optimism that things will change.
In Seberg (2019), Kristen Stewart plays French actress Jean Seberg, who became well known for her collaborations with French New Wave iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard. As her career flourished, she decided to do what any international actress would love to do: move to Hollywood and play in the big leagues. If nothing else, she can fall back on Godard movies and continue to make provocative art pieces that spoke to the intellectuals. Still, she was going to star in Paint Your Wagon (1969) and hopefully make a name for herself. It was simple as that, and this biopic, directed by Benedict Andrews, had the easy task of exploring her time within the studio system.
Anyone familiar with history will know that Seberg’s demise is one of utmost tragedy. What started as a form of expression ended with her paranoid. It was believed that she committed suicide because of the pressures placed on her by the F.B.I., who were wiretapping her phones and doing everything to spy on her. She was considered a threat to human decency, and there are plenty of moments where Stewart plays Seberg with this bug-eyed craziness that makes you understand the pressure building up inside. She never screams, but instead goes silent in a quest to not become an even easier target for the government.
The reason behind this is that she decided to align herself with the Black Panther Party. Upon landing in America, she finds a group of protestors and decides to join them, throwing up a black power salute as a sign of solidarity. What she doesn’t know is that the surveillance group COINTELPRO is among those spying on this protest and begin to target her. Because she was big in France, she may serve as a threat to American forces. Who was this outsider coming in to shake up the whole system? Considering that she was in an open marriage with Hakim Jamal (Anthony Mackie), her ties to the black community begin to draw COINTELPRO even closer.
Seberg decides to open with a scene of Stewart burning at the stakes, a fire growing close to herself. She is filming her first movie, St. Joan (1957), which follows the persecution of another woman who was standing up for her beliefs. She is close to death, and that is a perfect symbol for what COINTELPRO seeks to do to Seberg. Her career is over before it gets started, and she doesn’t even know it. Her privacy is being ripped apart, where intimacy with Jamal is no longer a private moment.
Everything that follows sides more with the paranoia thrillers that were popular in the early 1970s, when the majority of the film takes place. Think of The Conversation (1974), where we’re given a rare insight into how the F.B.I. takes away our rights without anyone knowing. They spy on figures while listening to the audio, looking at cameras, and trying to find a moment where things become clearer.
It’s a commentary on how racism overshadows human decency, and that makes the presence of Jack Solomon (Jack O’Connell) all the more jarring. Whereas his co-stars are stock forms of racist spies, Solomon has a sense of altruism in him, reflecting guilt in his actions and a desire to let Seberg know that she is in danger. While this is an offensive act given the outcome, Andrews’ decision to create this go-between serves the plot that would be a bit stretching in fiction. All it does is draw Seberg deeper into herself, making her quieter and wanting to look around for fear that everyone in the room has turned on her.
While there are references to the Black Panthers, it is ultimately a takedown of an innocent woman who believed in justice. Every lashing is invisible, more drawn by a reputation in decline, that she is no longer in control of her life. She can’t even act in film because she fears that the crew has spies hidden inside. For instance, she finds someone whom she doesn’t recognize and goes crazy, refusing to move on until he disappears. Add in the death of her daughter, the smear campaign launched by the F.B.I. and you begin to understand the bigger picture.
You understand why she crumbled. Because she stood up for justice, she lives with this guilt that she’s putting her family in danger, that her life no longer has privacy. The film is a bit dull otherwise, as there’s not enough substance to take any real risks. All of the struggles is insular, and at a certain point, it’s unable to drive the story forward, making things into a more interesting study of privacy, race relations, and the Hollywood system that she was trying to enter. There are things that could’ve been explored, but these moments are lost in favor of a meandering thriller about silence and adding odd moments of compassion from Solomon that seem a bit egregious and don’t place enough blame on the aggressors in this scenario. It’s sad what happened, but there’s nothing here that couldn’t better be read about in history books (or in a pretty great episode of the You Must Remember This podcast).
While Seberg does little to apply its activist heart to a bigger, more crucial point, the opposite can be said about Selma (2014), which finds every second having an urgency that gives depth to the moment and ultimately allows the racial division of the 1960s to feel like more than a dull plot device.
The simple truth is that whereas Seberg was about the personal struggles of one person, Selma was about an entire community. While it’s often dubbed as a biopic of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (David Oyelowo), that does a great disservice to everything else that the film achieves. Director Ava Duvernay doesn’t start the story with King band-wagoning on someone else’s cause. It starts with four black girls walking down the stairs in the Birmingham, Alabama 16th Street Baptist Church, who were killed by an explosion set by the Ku Klux Klan. This is followed by a scene of Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey) trying to vote only to be beaten by cops.
What makes Selma exemplary is how it makes everyone feel important to the bigger picture. Before you get the image of King that many want to see, you get the reasoning behind his activism. Because the audience is made privy to these acts, we’re able to understand his frustration, allowing what follows to be more than an isolated event. There is more going on with these innocent girls dying than Seberg symbolically burning at the stakes. The girls’ lives were cut short and for a terrible act of racism. Who wouldn’t want to be mad?
King is a central figure, constantly giving sermons at The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). When he sees the injustice around him, he begins to seek change. Whereas Sebeg ends without any bigger resolution, Selma manages to reflect the struggle with attention to minute detail, where people gather at homes to determine the best way to protest. It’s the small roles, the inconsequential person whose history doesn’t talk about with as deified an air as King, that begin to make the difference. Duvernay’s choice to stunt-cast Winfrey alone reflects that even those with power or influence were being abused by the system.
There’s also constant discussion with law enforcement in hopes that they will make a difference. King’s peaceful protests have days that end with so much frustration that you begin to see King as someone vulnerable, wishing that he could lash out. He thrusts his energy more into passionate speeches, trying to get people together to make a symbol of a better kind. While he wasn’t against rioting, his peaceful protests were attempting to show how blacks can be civilized. Meanwhile, he had to deal with everyone from racist officials like George Wallace (Tim Roth), and President Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), doing everything to get legislation passed. These weren’t convenient or overnight successes. The struggle pretty much did the speaking.
In one of the more staggering aspects of Selma, Duvernay allows the camera to linger on a peaceful march from Selma to Montgomery that is full of tension. There is concern that one small thing going wrong upsets the entire effort. There’s silence, staring at the judgmental police surrounding them, waiting to react on their impulses. When it goes awry, there’s tear gas and batons everywhere, people running for their lives. There’s plenty that’s uncomfortable about it, and suddenly it becomes clear on why this is about more than King. If it was just him, this whole thing would feel chintzy, not reflecting the impact that King sought to make. By giving supporting characters depth, it allows the movement to feel more powerful, about more than any one person.
Both Seberg and Selma focus on the impacts of protesting, though the latter is more confident in how it chooses to reflect this. It’s true that as a white woman, Seberg wasn’t as prone to the same injustices, though what is done to her is just seen as icky, never allowing her to feel more complicated as a character in her decision to defend black rights. You don’t even get a sense of why the Black Panther Party was such a notorious group. Maybe if it split the time with them instead of those oppressing Seberg, it could’ve lead to some more interesting parallels. Meanwhile, when King is wiretapped, there is dramatic tension and frustration as he tries to keep a cool head, discussing with wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo) how he has this anger inside of him. It feels radical, like something new to an old text.
Through an ironic series of events, I went to an advanced preview of Selma, and I can tell you that timing made a difference. I praise Duvernay now for being able to reflect something that has become unfortunately commonplace and even reminiscent over this past weekend. When I saw it, the Ferguson Uprising had yet to happen and didn’t reflect why King’s story was as important now as ever. By reflecting honestly what happened in the 1960s, it enhanced the significance of why they protested. Seberg barely makes another tragic story feel more than tedious.
Both stories feature 1960s icons who spoke against racism and were wiretapped by the F.B.I. before suffering premature deaths. The major difference is that where Selma did the brilliant decision to reflect the community impacted by the struggles, Seberg simply wanted to alter life into a paranoia thriller that did nobody justice, even making largely negative figures in the narrative sympathetic. While both are tragic, audiences understand why Selma does what it does. There is anger boiling underneath in every frame, and you’re eager to get that justice. For Seberg, you want something more interesting to happen, and even Stewart by the end-credits text looks like she’s impatiently waiting for it to end.
Here’s a simple rule to follow: if you have a cause that matters, try to make it look that way. The story of Seberg is sad, but I don’t know that Andrews has enough there there to make it a compelling narrative. We don't have a great sense of reason behind her decisions, and the cause feels more symbolic than full of substance. If there was some way to reflect why the Black Panther involvement was scary, then maybe this film could begin to reach a better point. Until then, it's too conventional for anyone to care.
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