They say history is written by the victors, which explains why you may not be familiar with Pauli Murray, the Black, queer human-rights lawyer whose pioneering work towards overturning racist and sexist legislation in 20th-century America has been consigned to the margins. The filmmakers Julie Cohen and Betsy West admit that they too were none the wiser about her until embarking on My Name is Pauli Murray, their new documentary whose declarative, #SayHerName-style title emphatically states Murray was here, she existed, she mattered. Having committed the feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life story to film during her pop-culture memeification era — in 2018’s Oscar-nominated feature RBG — the directing duo have now turned their attention to a more unsung heroine.
Their consciousness-raising mission is admirable: it is surprising to learn that Murray refused to move to the ‘coloured’ section of a bus in the segregated South 15 years before Rosa Parks and that she fought to enshrine gender equality in law six years before Ginsburg’s first Supreme Court case on the matter. The documentary wants to provide a teaching moment to its audience and quite literally does so in the handful of college-set scenes that punctuate it. Its pedagogical ambition shines through when Professor Brittney Cooper orates to a group of disengaged teenagers about Murray’s achievements in a Rutgers University lecture hall, all of whom ignore her attempts at audience participation, as well as in a smaller class at Yale where conversation is more free-flowing.
It is a shame, then, that a figure as inspiring as Pauli Murray is rendered with such uninspiring filmmaking. The documentary is simply not cinematic enough. It is bogged down by lengthy on-screen text — quotes, love letters, bills, newspaper cuttings, doctors’ reports, legal documents, you name it — that, coupled with the overreliance on slow pans across archive photographs, stunts the film’s rhythm and makes it visually flat. Devices that are initially effective, such as tension-building split screens that show Murray facing off with powerful, sometimes ideologically opposed figures, grow tired through excessive use. My Name is Pauli Murray’s standard cradle-to-grave structure comes off as a wearying march towards the inevitable, and further storytelling limitations are imposed by the zippy, 90-minute runtime that only allows for Cohen and West to superficially shade in the many facets of their extraordinary subject. The film solders generic trappings onto someone who was anything but and boxes the fervently anti-conventional Murray into a hyper-conventional documentary format.
This clash between subject and form ultimately sinks My Name is Pauli Murray. Standing as a belated celebration of a forgotten social-justice trailblazer, it hits the necessary beats. However, the film’s unimaginative aesthetic language diminishes Murray and straitjackets her complexity. In addition to being a lawyer, she was also a published poet, an Episcopal priest, valedictorian at Howard University, a personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt…the vast scope of her achievements makes her defiantly unclassifiable. To see her various professions and personal milestones sped through with such a light touch seems a waste. Pauli Murray deserved better.
