John Boorman continues his exploration of remote political situations by moving from an invented situation in Panama to a fictional account around the real stories told during the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of Apartheid under the presidency of Nelson Mandela. He also continues his propensity for pushing too much into a single film, attacking about three different ideas without getting them to connect particularly well. Throw in a fairly inappropriate romantic subplot, and you've got something of a mess of a film, the kind that Boorman had in his DNA. However, just like most other Boorman films, it remains an extremely interesting one despite the narrative deficiencies.
Anna (Juliette Binoche) is an Afrikaner and poet from an upper-class Afrikaner family in the wake of the political upheaval that was the election of Mandela. Despite the objections of her family, she has decided to cover the Commission for the South African Broadcasting Company. Upon reaching the center of the commission's start in Cape Town, she meets her sound man, Dumi (Menzi Ngubane), a black South African, and the Washington Post reporter Langston (Samuel L. Jackson). Langston is an American radical who sees the Commission as a way for those in the previous South African government to elude actual justice (a very real concern from certain quarters of South Africa) in favor of this idea of Ubuntu. When Anna tries to explain how she's tried to make things better despite the color of her skin, he damns her with the rest of the Afrikaners for their complicity in the regime that held down and terrorized the local black population. However, they're somewhat stuck together since they're on the same beat following the Commission around, headed by Reverend Mzondo (Owen Sejake), from small village to small village, hearing the tearful testimonies of mothers asking for the stories of their missing and presumed dead children while those that perpetrated the murders confess to them to receive their amnesty.
The film recreates some of the testimony, and it's where the film is its most powerful. Perhaps, in a dramatic context, it's somewhat artificial since it doesn't rely on anything that the film builds on its own, instead relying on the opening text that says that the testimonies are derived from real records to give it power, but that's still there. These are harrowing stories of abuse and murder, and the performances in the small roles of everyone involved sells everything extraordinarily well. And yet, the movie makes some small effort to be even-handed, which I found really interesting.
There's an embrace of complexity around the issue that I really appreciated. It's not just comic book villains versus the innocent and pure oppressed masses. Well, De Jager (Brendan Gleeson), the former colonel who becomes the film's central antagonist that Langston gets an exclusive interview with, is borderline a comic book villain, but he does also get a moment to justify himself, talking about the terrorism of communist rebels who killed and tortured a fellow Afrikaner that a movie less interested in embracing complexity would have eluded. The rest of him is borderline snarling about the supremacy of Afrikaners over the subjugated inferiors, but he does get that moment. There's also a moment from Dumi where he chastises Langston for thinking of the guilt and innocence across racial lines in South Africa as a black and white issue when there are all shades of gray. That moment interested me, but it happened so early that I began to feel like the film was wasting the potential of the character until the final moments, which did something to bring Dumi up as a complex character, but honestly not enough in the end.
So, where this film mainly stumbles is in the introduction of the romance between Anna and Langston. It feels like four quarter producer thinking to introduce a romance to attract middle-aged women to the cinema rather than an extension of what needs to happen in the film, but at least there's an effort late to tie the idea of Anne and Langston leading a small romance while lying to everyone around them about it to the idea of lies and reconciliation across South Africa, but it's so trite, reminding me of Patricia Arquette using the suffering of the poor Burmese people to get over the death of her husband and child that I can't accept it. It's just wrong in this film, and I know I'm not the first to point it out. It's still wrong for the film, though. Making the comparison between a woman lying to her husband about a small affair and men who raped, tortured, and murdered people for questionable reasons, often making disingenuous confessions of guilt designed to get them off of real punishment, demeans the larger point the film is trying to make about the messiness of justice, forgiveness, and healing after a period of pain.
Taking out the romance wouldn't quite fix the film, though. It would certainly help, perhaps just keeping Anna and Langston as platonic, kindred spirits, both finding out the depths of the horrors of the worst excesses of apartheid together from different points of view, but there's more with the film that just doesn't quite click. I think the movie's heart is with the survivors, but it's head is with both Dumi and De Jager. However, despite some early dialogue De Jager gives to justify himself, he's treated a bit too thinly, and Dumi's part in the whole pre-Mandela regime gets sidelined for way too long and then dealt with way too quickly to make it really effective. I actually think that Dumi should have been the main character because he had the most potential, trying to do his small part to fix the crimes of his past without anyone finding out about them. There's also an interesting coda to it all that the film should have dwelt on longer about how the Commission was simply never going to be enough for many people within South Africa, Dumi's fate being the key dramatic manifestation of that idea. There will never be real forgiveness across the nation, and retributive action will continue no matter the ideals of Ubuntu.
I can't help but think of Clint Eastwood's Invictus while watching, thinking about, and writing about In My Country. Eastwood's film was more purely a fantasy film, using the Rugby World Cup as an idealistic view of South Africa at the same point in time. However, Boorman wasn't interested in easy fantasy. He wanted to dig into the reality of the human experience on the ground, and his more ambitious desires got stunted more fully by his own narrative impulses than Eastwood's less ambitious desires in his own film.
The film does get helped by solid performances all around. Binoche's accent may falter a bit pretty consistently, but much like Barbara Stanwyck in The Plough and the Stars by Ford, I feel she gives a strongly affecting performance nonetheless. This might be Jackson's best performance, not because it's revelatory, but because it's pretty solidly good with some layers. Ngubane is good, but simply doesn't have enough screentime to have the effect he needs. Gleeson relishes his scene-chewing role, and he might be the most effortless actor in the bunch.
Boorman was a professional, intelligent director who often put more into his films that the films could really dramatically hold, and this is a good example of how he could put too many plates in the air. It doesn't have the wild energy of something less successful like Leo the Last or more successful like Zardoz, but it also doesn't have the more strictly built lines of something like Deliverance or Hell in the Pacific. In My Country isn't without worth, but it really needed someone with a stronger screenwriting sense to cull excesses and bring more in alignment with the overall film's objectives.
Anna (Juliette Binoche) is an Afrikaner and poet from an upper-class Afrikaner family in the wake of the political upheaval that was the election of Mandela. Despite the objections of her family, she has decided to cover the Commission for the South African Broadcasting Company. Upon reaching the center of the commission's start in Cape Town, she meets her sound man, Dumi (Menzi Ngubane), a black South African, and the Washington Post reporter Langston (Samuel L. Jackson). Langston is an American radical who sees the Commission as a way for those in the previous South African government to elude actual justice (a very real concern from certain quarters of South Africa) in favor of this idea of Ubuntu. When Anna tries to explain how she's tried to make things better despite the color of her skin, he damns her with the rest of the Afrikaners for their complicity in the regime that held down and terrorized the local black population. However, they're somewhat stuck together since they're on the same beat following the Commission around, headed by Reverend Mzondo (Owen Sejake), from small village to small village, hearing the tearful testimonies of mothers asking for the stories of their missing and presumed dead children while those that perpetrated the murders confess to them to receive their amnesty.
The film recreates some of the testimony, and it's where the film is its most powerful. Perhaps, in a dramatic context, it's somewhat artificial since it doesn't rely on anything that the film builds on its own, instead relying on the opening text that says that the testimonies are derived from real records to give it power, but that's still there. These are harrowing stories of abuse and murder, and the performances in the small roles of everyone involved sells everything extraordinarily well. And yet, the movie makes some small effort to be even-handed, which I found really interesting.
There's an embrace of complexity around the issue that I really appreciated. It's not just comic book villains versus the innocent and pure oppressed masses. Well, De Jager (Brendan Gleeson), the former colonel who becomes the film's central antagonist that Langston gets an exclusive interview with, is borderline a comic book villain, but he does also get a moment to justify himself, talking about the terrorism of communist rebels who killed and tortured a fellow Afrikaner that a movie less interested in embracing complexity would have eluded. The rest of him is borderline snarling about the supremacy of Afrikaners over the subjugated inferiors, but he does get that moment. There's also a moment from Dumi where he chastises Langston for thinking of the guilt and innocence across racial lines in South Africa as a black and white issue when there are all shades of gray. That moment interested me, but it happened so early that I began to feel like the film was wasting the potential of the character until the final moments, which did something to bring Dumi up as a complex character, but honestly not enough in the end.
So, where this film mainly stumbles is in the introduction of the romance between Anna and Langston. It feels like four quarter producer thinking to introduce a romance to attract middle-aged women to the cinema rather than an extension of what needs to happen in the film, but at least there's an effort late to tie the idea of Anne and Langston leading a small romance while lying to everyone around them about it to the idea of lies and reconciliation across South Africa, but it's so trite, reminding me of Patricia Arquette using the suffering of the poor Burmese people to get over the death of her husband and child that I can't accept it. It's just wrong in this film, and I know I'm not the first to point it out. It's still wrong for the film, though. Making the comparison between a woman lying to her husband about a small affair and men who raped, tortured, and murdered people for questionable reasons, often making disingenuous confessions of guilt designed to get them off of real punishment, demeans the larger point the film is trying to make about the messiness of justice, forgiveness, and healing after a period of pain.
Taking out the romance wouldn't quite fix the film, though. It would certainly help, perhaps just keeping Anna and Langston as platonic, kindred spirits, both finding out the depths of the horrors of the worst excesses of apartheid together from different points of view, but there's more with the film that just doesn't quite click. I think the movie's heart is with the survivors, but it's head is with both Dumi and De Jager. However, despite some early dialogue De Jager gives to justify himself, he's treated a bit too thinly, and Dumi's part in the whole pre-Mandela regime gets sidelined for way too long and then dealt with way too quickly to make it really effective. I actually think that Dumi should have been the main character because he had the most potential, trying to do his small part to fix the crimes of his past without anyone finding out about them. There's also an interesting coda to it all that the film should have dwelt on longer about how the Commission was simply never going to be enough for many people within South Africa, Dumi's fate being the key dramatic manifestation of that idea. There will never be real forgiveness across the nation, and retributive action will continue no matter the ideals of Ubuntu.
I can't help but think of Clint Eastwood's Invictus while watching, thinking about, and writing about In My Country. Eastwood's film was more purely a fantasy film, using the Rugby World Cup as an idealistic view of South Africa at the same point in time. However, Boorman wasn't interested in easy fantasy. He wanted to dig into the reality of the human experience on the ground, and his more ambitious desires got stunted more fully by his own narrative impulses than Eastwood's less ambitious desires in his own film.
The film does get helped by solid performances all around. Binoche's accent may falter a bit pretty consistently, but much like Barbara Stanwyck in The Plough and the Stars by Ford, I feel she gives a strongly affecting performance nonetheless. This might be Jackson's best performance, not because it's revelatory, but because it's pretty solidly good with some layers. Ngubane is good, but simply doesn't have enough screentime to have the effect he needs. Gleeson relishes his scene-chewing role, and he might be the most effortless actor in the bunch.
Boorman was a professional, intelligent director who often put more into his films that the films could really dramatically hold, and this is a good example of how he could put too many plates in the air. It doesn't have the wild energy of something less successful like Leo the Last or more successful like Zardoz, but it also doesn't have the more strictly built lines of something like Deliverance or Hell in the Pacific. In My Country isn't without worth, but it really needed someone with a stronger screenwriting sense to cull excesses and bring more in alignment with the overall film's objectives.