(Credits: Far Out / Neon)

Director and screenwriter Ava DuVernay has taken an innovative approach to adapting a non-fiction book. The book is Pulitzer-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, which looks at racism from a new perspective by finding parallels between traditional American racial attitudes and other forms of social stratification, from the traditional caste system of India to the stigmatising of Jews by the Nazis.

Caste’s theory was exhaustively researched and well-argued, and the book received critical acclaim despite some controversy over its theme. However, it is also scholarly, complex, and filled with challenging arguments and novel concepts, and at first glance, it is not a promising subject for film adaptation. It may be worth noting that a surprising number of books provide either a synopsis of Caste or a layman’s explanation, acknowledging both the public’s enthusiasm for the book’s content and its comparative difficulty. Origin manages to turn it into something almost as informative as the original book but far more accessible.

DuVernay’s first step in overcoming this challenge is to make the film a drama rather than the more obvious choice of documentary. The content and message of Caste are transmitted through a careful balance of biography, dramatised pertinent background material, and historical re-enactment. The director explained in an interview that she felt her task was to provide a central character the audience could identify with and weave that character’s story with the account she was attempting to give in Caste. Gifted actress Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who has worked with DuVernay before, was chosen to play author Isabel Wilkerson, mostly during a period in her life when she left journalism behind for her university teaching position, and has one successful book to her credit.

Over the course of the film, Wilkerson cares for her elderly mother, meets and marries her second husband, and deals with day-to-day life, including the deaths of two loved ones. She also develops the idea behind Caste and begins the lengthy process of researching and developing the book. Wilkerson’s life, observations, and interactions with others are used to quietly illustrate the larger themes she is working to clarify and express. Ellis-Taylor is fantastic in the role, presenting every emotional layer of her real-life character and expressing both the personal pain and the thoughtful absorption that goes into the writer’s project.

It is immediately clear that this is not a straightforward biographical drama when the opening scene does not involve Wilkerson but is a portrayal of the final moments in the life of Trayvon Martin (played by stage actor Myles Frost) just before he is killed while walking “suspiciously” through an all-white neighbourhood. Unexpected scenes of this kind turn up frequently in Origin, their relevance made clear as the story unwinds. The storyline is not in chronological order but moves through the chosen period in Wilkerson’s life, frequently cutting to an unrelated event that provides context or to a re-enactment of a situation she mentions in her book, sometimes accompanied by Wilkerson’s voice-over explanation and at other times, abruptly appearing like a sudden flash of memory.

The goal is not simply to re-tell the contents of Caste or describe its writing process but to portray the material in its natural habitat, including the present-day consequences of longstanding racist systems. In this, DuVernay succeeds brilliantly, even in the endlessly difficult task of getting across what one form of racial discrimination has to do with a different, seemingly unrelated class system. This is done by using everything the author encounters, from news headlines and formal research to her mother’s reminiscences and her own memories, to demonstrate the true nature of longstanding systemic racism. DuVernay assumed from the start that this eccentric approach would not find support from a movie studio; she has explained that she was free to do the unconventional partly because Origin was, by choice, an independent film, one she had to pay for through private fundraising. The lack of studio sponsorship was made up for in artistic freedom.

The out-of-sequence approach continues, telling the story of Wilkerson’s work on Caste while she dealt with personal tragedies and, at the same time, building her arguments through vignettes that string ideas together. For example, a re-enactment early in the film gives a newsreel-style clip of a man who famously refused to salute Nazi officials. Multiple scenes represent Wilkerson’s persistent sense that Nazism had underlying similarities to American racial attitudes, while others see no connection between the two and find her theory irrational, including an embarrassing discussion with German scholars who politely but firmly dismiss her ideas. The author is vindicated when, in a rare scene that shows the literal process of research, she discovers documents demonstrating that Nazi officials consciously used US segregation laws and practices as a model for their treatment of Jews.

All of this is shown through a series of creatively filmed flashbacks and historical recreations, which entertain and often shock as much as they clarify. Pains are taken to make the historic re-enactments detailed and highly realistic, but these scenes are especially striking because they highly dramatise and fully humanise the experiences of the despised factions. The film does not shy away from the emotions in these scenes. Whether showing Hindu ‘Untouchables’ affectionately protecting one another while doing the filthy work that is their lot, following a Black couple attempting to remain safely inoffensive while conducting research in the 1930s American South, portraying a painfully realistic public lynching, or a child who has inadvertently broken a class code, the film does not hesitate to elicit sympathy for the harms done by arbitrary categories of human beings. The approach was effective; during the film’s premiere in Venice, it not only received a six-minute standing ovation but left many of the audience members in tears.

If Origin has a flaw, it is that the sheer amount of material covered is a bit overwhelming. The film sometimes veers toward the sentimental and occasionally the didactic. A scene in which Wilkerson forms a brief, awkward human bond with a plumber (played by comedian Nick Offerman), who comes to her home wearing a pro-Trump ‘MAGA’ cap, fails to get its point across and feels superfluous. Surprisingly, though, scenes which actually present the content of Caste and discuss Wilkerson’s theory and research at some length are made entertaining by clarity, a brisk pace, and visuals that make the material impactful – as well as by Ellis-Taylor’s performance, which makes the author’s enthusiasm contagious.

Acknowledging the novelty of some of the ideas being presented, DuVernay commented during the film’s festival schedule, “In this film, we’re not seeking agreement. I don’t need anyone to agree with everything. I’m seeking engagement.” She invites viewers to “think beyond what you were thinking about before. Allow yourself to open up and encounter other ideas. That’s the goal.” It’s a goal that this unlikely adaptation has made, at the very least, possible.