Ava DuVernay’s next film,Origin,comes to select theaters this week.Originis conceptually unique; it adapts a cerebral work of literary non-fiction –Isabel Wilkerson’s exploration of parallel structures of discrimination,Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents–by transforming it into the story of Wilkerson’s creative process. It sounds audacious, but DuVernay has never been flustered by this. Today, as a director of multiple award-winning films and television shows, she is an auteur who can feel confident that her work will be taken seriously, no matter how innovative. But back in 2012, DuVernay was a relatively unknown talent, a working film publicist, and she was debuting her second feature film: the indie dramaMiddle of Nowhere.Middle of Nowhereis no less audacious, and, considering its tiny budget, represents a small miracle.
Middle of Nowhere
A med student (Emayatzy Corinealdi) considers leaving her long-imprisoned husband (Omari Hardwick) for a charming bus driver (David Oyelowo).
What Is ‘Middle of Nowhere About’?
The story opens in a prison visiting room, where Ruby (Emayatzy Corinealdi) is visiting Derek (Omari Hardwick) for the first time following his arrest on unnamed charges. He tries to convince her to move on with her life without him, but she clings to her vision of the future with the two of them together. Eventually, she wears him down, reminding him that he has a chance to be released on parole in five years. Ruby believes she can hold on that long. Derek seems to have his doubts.
The rest of the story takes place four years later.Ruby has put her life on hold, having quit medical school to work as a nurse. Every week, she makes the trip from her home in Compton to the high desert Victorville Federal Penitentiary — a draining trip by bus. Most of the money she earns goes to paying off her debt to Derek’s lawyers. The only people she spends much time with are Ruth and Rosie, her mother and sister (Lorraine ToussaintandEdwina Findley), who both find ways to tell her that they don’t think the way she is living is much of a life at all. ButRuby remains zealously committed to her dream of getting her marriage back.
This status quo is tested as Derek’s first parole hearing approaches. Details emerge suggesting that Derek’s commitment to doing straight time is not his top priority, along with other betrayals. Meanwhile, Ruby is being persistently courted by Brian (David Oyelowo), the bus driver who sees her every day on her ride to work, andhis charm is beginning to break through to her. As the story progresses, Ruby begins to question whether her devotion to Derek is really someone else’s dream, some earlier version of her that no longer exists.
‘Origin’ Review: Ava DuVernay’s Unusual Adaptation Rights Itself in the End
Starring Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, ‘Origin’ is an odd adaptation that takes too long to make its concept work.
How Ava DuVernay Brought Her Vision to Life on a Tiny Budget
Middle of Nowherehad areported budget of $200,000. That’s more than most of us have in our bank accounts, but it’s not really enough to make a movie, even a small indie one. There are many creative ways to make a film on a dangerously low budget. You can shoot with a stripped down crew on a handheld prosumer camera, asLike Crazydid, and simply accept that it will look raw. You can write a script that you can shoot entirely in your family’s beach house, asCharlie McDowelldid forThe One I Love. Both of those movies premiered to great acclaim at theSundance Film Festival. And so didMiddle of Nowhere; the film won the festival’s Grand Jury Prize and DuVernay won the directing award. If you’re shooting a micro-budget film in America, an award-strewn Sundance premiere is usually the outcome you consciously hope for.
Rather than lean into the limitations of a small budget with a raw aesthetic,DuVernay chose to shoot a scaled down version of a polished, beautiful, bigger-budget family drama. In order to reduce the film to a manageable scope, DuVernay and her cinematographer,Bradford Young,shoot the film, as they say, “through the eye of a needle,” with tight framing and shallow focus. This narrow frame allows you to work with fewer lights (as you don’t have many crew members to move them around for you) without sacrificing the control necessary to sculpt with the light to have. Of course, it helps to be working with a cinematographer like Young, an up-and-coming superstar back then who would go on to lensSelma,ArrivalandSolo: A Star Wars Story.
There are trade-offs to shooting in such tight frames. You get slightly less work from your locations. DuVernay went the extra mileto shoot in locations authentic to the storyshe was trying to tell — in Compton, Inglewood, and South Los Angeles. But this care only bleeds in from the periphery. More importantly,you are demanding a lot from your actors, all of whom will be featured in constant close-ups. Close-ups tend to focus the audience on the characters' interior life, and so your cast will need to be in tune with what their characters are thinking and feeling at all times, and to let that play compellingly on their faces. Of course, David Oyelowo is able to deliver (again, it helps to work with future superstars). Toussaint, who would go on to playthe hall-of-fame villain VeeinOrange is the New Black,also was able to come through.
But the real star, of course, is Corinealdi, who, as Ruby, has to play a character as she slowly and painfully gives into change. Ruby’s inner conflict is the source of most of this drama’s tension, andCorinealdi makes the movie work by keeping that tension alive on her face. (DuVernay helps her by frequently shooting her turned away from the camera, forcing us to imagine what she might be thinking.)
Is ‘Middle of Nowhere’ Worth Watching?
Middle of Nowhereis much more than exercise in how to make a little go a long way. None of the work turned in by DuVernay’s cast and crew would add up to much if she hadn’t been there at the beginning with a great script.
DuVernayremembers having the ideathat grew intoMiddle of Nowherewhile working on the set of Michael Mann’s thrillerCollateral. This pedigree has a certain poetry to it, as so much of Mann’s work is emotionally shaded by his own experiences on the set of hisearly TV movieThe Jericho Mile, which was set in, and shot in, an operational prison. Prison looms over DuVernay’s film as well, but in a different way. Whereas Mann’s films frequently imagine what it would be like if a person similar to him had to deal with the trauma of incarceration,Middle of Nowheredepicts the members of an over-incarcerated Black community trying to escape from under the shadow of a jail.
Also, unlike Mann, DuVernay is not working in the crime genre, and her plot doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles. Instead, she keeps things interesting by allowing her characters to express themselves in surprising and poetic ways. This begins right away in the first scene, when Derek tells Ruby he doesn’t want her to let his incarceration derail her life. “Don’t stop for me,” he tells her. “Youareme,” she replies.
DuVernay also gets a lot out of Ruby’s relationship with her sister and mother. If there’s a flaw inMiddle of Nowhere, it’s that the sub-plots are more interesting than the main relationship between Ruby and Derek.These are particularly richly imagined characters whose perspectives are recognizably colored by their own experiences, even without much expository backstory spelled out. We learn a lot about Rosie just in the way she describes love as having somebody who will remember you if you disappear. Likewise, we understand so much about Ruth’s parenting style in the way she replies when Ruby asks her to loan her money. Ruby says the amount she owes, but clarifies that she already has half of it: “So now I’m supposed to do math?” (But of course, once Ruby names the sum out loud, Ruth gives it to her.)
In general, what seems tooften characterize a film by DuVernay is her characters' abilities to express themselves through words. Witha film about Martin Luther King Jr, and an upcoming film about Isabel Wilkerson, DuVernay has now twice featured writers and thinkers as her main character. With a surprising similarity, the climactic moment ofMiddle of Nowhereis the reading of a letter that Ruby has written to her husband, which plays in voiceover. DuVernay has long been innovating new ways to bring the written word to life in film. She just had to start small.
You can buy your tickets forOrigin, which comes to select theaters this week.
