Selma and the Long Walk to Freedom

"Uncomfortable, yet necessary viewing." This is the distinction being handed to period pieces lately. Last year's 12 Years a Slave was praised not only for its authenticity and performances but also for the raw power of its brutality. This past year, we were presented with civil rights struggles of blacks in Selma and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (though released in late December I will include this film as a 2014 release), both of which made sure to depict unsettling scenes of violence and injustice. If you've seen Steven Spielberg's Lincoln then Ava Duvernay's Selma might have been a similar viewing experience. Like Lincoln, Selma focused heavily on the political strategy and media leveraging undertaken to bring about structural changes and devoted special care to the main character depicted. I was not able to view the last hour of Mandela but feel I have enough to work off of from several reviews and the context already established within the first 90 minutes. I have read that Mandela was adapted from the departed president's 600 page autobiography which would explain the film's running time and speedy plot. As a whole, the film was not completely impressive. Idris Elba as Mandela and Naomi Harris as Winnie delivered great performances but the dramatization was still week. This is also a point brought up in a review I happened to read but I would like to expand on it. With Selma and Lincoln the films' close examinations of their characters unveiled the men behind the legacies and fleshed out their complexities. David Oyelowo as Dr. King was able to convey the preacher's forceful, charismatic speech and the pragmatic approach to his moral campaign while also handing audiences the allegations of his affairs and trusting on viewer interpretation to judge. Mandela was too idolized a protagonist for Elba to add more dimension to a character the filmmakers could only view as a towering statue of inspiration and legend. His womanizing affairs were approached as supplements to establishing Mandela's back story rather than as opportunities to explore his infidelity. Scenes meant to establish his motivation and elicit audience emotion did not feel as potent as the beating of marchers in Selma. But this is just me and I prefer my films as more gritty and authentic. Selma is a superior film to Mandela within its performances and the startling humanity of its historical characters. Mandela works as an informative biopic but the film maintained a distance in awe from the character and was at a disadvantage with adapting so much material into one enjoyable feature length film.