Although many reviews will be based on the civil rights’ movement and your personal opinions about it, the “inspired by” versus “based on real facts” approach and the having an extraordinary cast delivering great performances but perhaps not a great movie, those were not my thoughts when it was over and the credits started showing up on my screen.
To me, it felt as if I have witnessed my whole life span condensed in a couple of hours. Most probably because, coincidentally, I had been researching my year of birth (1965) for a piece of writing I was working on this same week and the movie visually brought back all I have been reading about it.
I couldn’t stop feeling utterly amazed at the progression made by the last three generations in the last fifty years: from killing the ones (blacks and whites) with “I have a dream” to the approval of the black vote, to the existence of an extremely successful Oprah, to the end of the Apartheid, to currently having a black president in the USA.
I can’t avoid remembering the words of a dear friend, “you have to understand things from the perspective from where they are coming”. So much wisdom in these words! The generational gap and the way in which each one of them struggles, loses and conquers the battles to fulfill one same value is the juxtaposition that sets the tone of the movie, it is its main subject and the bottom line of it all.
So, after reading many reviews in here, I decided to go searching a bit further and found an interview with the main cast that, to my own surprise, validated my point of view and left me even more impressed with David Oyelowo, an actor I never heard of before in my life.