The election of Barack Obama may have gone a long way in advancing civil rights, but racism is still very much alive and well in America, as American Violet so plainly shows. The film doesn’t try to dazzle us with histrionics or clobber us over the head with liberal conceit. It simply uses a single woman as the symbol of an ideological clash between those who feel the color of their skin gives them the right of oppression and a beleaguered minority straining for fundamental human rights.

American Violet is the true story of Dee Roberts (Nicole Beharie), a 24-year-old African American single mother of four girls struggling to make ends meet in a small Texas town. Dee’s already fragile world comes crashing down around her when the powerful local district attorney (Michael O’Keefe) orders a sweeping drug raid on her housing project, catching dozens of people — guilty and innocent — in his haphazardly cast net. Thrown into the rancid county prison, Dee discovers she has been charged as a drug dealer. The D.A. has no proof whatsoever other than the word of a mentally unstable informant willing to say anything to avoid jail time.

Dee is offered a reprehensible choice: plead guilty and return to her girls and mother (Alfre Woodard) as a convicted felon, or seek justice from inside the prison walls she will call home for a very long time. With the help of a local attorney (Will Patton) and an ACLU lawyer (Tim Blake Nelson), Dee chooses to risk everything to fight the obstinate and monstrously corrupt Texas criminal justice system.

Most Americans recoil at the thought that a travesty of justice of this magnitude could occur in this country. And yet, as American Violet shows us, Dee Roberts’ plight is far from unusual. Powerful D.A.s, intent on getting numbers that show they are tough on crime, target the poorest among us, and then give them the option of holding on to their honor in prison or returning to freedom tainted. That this system is powered by such a long engrafted prejudice and staggeringly arrogant racism in this day and age is astonishing. Yet this true story took place during the 2000 election, as the film reminds us by intercutting images of the rancorous presidential campaign. The film seems to want to draw a ragged line between the two histories, perhaps insinuating that the Bush Administration’s future failure in caring for destitute African American’s needs after Hurricane Katrina is an equally barbarous crime.

Much of the drama in American Violet takes place around a deposition table. The film doesn’t tell its story in a particularly flashy way, nor does it possess any special artistic flourish. It is straight-forward and earnest, and, as with all docudramas peddling an agenda, occasionally suffers from being too heavy-handed. But it is an imperative story worth telling, the importance of which manages to assuage some of the film’s less than successful moments. The vast middle of the film is a constant ping ponging of events that lulls you into such a false sense of inevitability that the end, even though you see it coming, still sneaks up on you. Moral validation has rarely felt this good.

If American Violet’s success can be tied to anything, it is its terrific actors, particularly the beautiful newcomer Nicole Beharie. Beharie, in only the second credited acting role of her life, endows Dee simultaneously with fortitude and frailty. Her passionate fire ensures Dee is never seen as a victim, no matter her circumstances. Memorize her name now. You will be seeing it again.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.