Hey folks, Harry here with Sheldrake's look at John Boorman's IN MY COUNTRY - Boorman directing Sam the man? That's all any sane person truly need know, but you... you want more... well, here choke on more! Hehehehe... Here ya go..

IN MY COUNTRY
Directed by John Boorman
Antjie Krog (book)
Ann Peacock (screenplay)
2005

NOTE: Ann Peacock also wrote THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, in post-production.

Sheldrake here, reporting from midtown in New York City, the city that may have just said “NO” to their billionaire mayor and his giddy dream of sticking this already overstressed burg with the 2012 Olympics. Let’s go to the movies.

It’s been a strange day—that is, a bad day—and I didn’t think I’d have an interview for you at all. I was supposed to see Robert Zemeckis speak at MOMA tonight, but was prevented from doing so by an income-generating appointment – so I thought. Then, at the last minute, the appointment was cancelled, along with the income, and, while it was too late to go to MOMA I had a screening for the new John Boorman film IN MY COUNTRY. I knew bupkiss about it, other than Samuel Jackson was in it and it was about South Africa just after Apartheid. Oh God, I thought, and here I am still recovering from Der Untergang. Yes, that was weeks ago, but can’t someone please make a nice new movie from a Carl Hiaasen book? With my current financial concerns distracting me as they are, I didn’t know if I’d be able to summon the concentration to deal with this movie tonight. But I pulled myself together, caught the usual M116 bus over to 110th and Broadway, bolted a slice of pizza from Coronet—these slices you have to see to believe; I mean, they’re thin, all right, but one slice maybe fits on the red serving tray—then caught the number one train downtown to 59th Street. I maneuvered around the huge plywood construction wall surrounding the new (again) Columbus Circle, ducked into Whole Foods in the new Time Warner Building to get a cup of coffee, mostly to keep my hands warm in the 35 degree Fahrenheit cold, made my way past the Plaza Hotel, soon to be just one more fancy dump with a coop board and glorious memories, and headed south to the movie house. I hooked up with my friend F—; you met F— in my first review, CLOSER. Tonight the tribute to be paid was an eggplant panini. I gladly delivered the goods, whispering into his ear all the while that glory was fleeting, then we headed across the street to the screening.

IN MY COUNTRY takes place in South Africa in 1995. A thirty-something Afrikaner, Juliet Binoche, attends the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, in which white Afrikaners confess their crimes for amnesty, and black Africans listen and respond. The hearings are covered by a black American Washington Post reporter, Samuel L. Jackson. Juliet travels from blind innocence to the knowledge that her country’s government has been a framework for atrocity, while Sam travels from a sort of distant Ivy League fashionable outrage and desire for retribution to an understanding that perhaps his American sense of justice can’t be completely reconciled with the African one.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? You know, you complain loudly that you want movies made that mean something. Genre movies are all well and good, and I love many of ‘em, but where are the films that that deal with real injustice, with the pain of whole peoples, of nations; that deal with oppression and mass murder and the enslavement of man by man? Homo homini lupus: man is a wolf to man—Freud. Beware the beast man… he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. – The Sacred Scrolls. Then somebody makes a movie like IN MY COUNTRY and you’re sorry you brought it up.
I love Excalibur passionately, past point of reason, shading over into a sort of narcotic endorphin satiety – I mean, I almost hallucinate when I see Boorman’s take on King Arthur, I’m rolling around in an internal chemical rush, I’m having visions. Boorman got it, he completely, totally got what makes the King Arthur story so compelling: that it’s the story of a boy-king who has greatness thrust upon’m. (Yes, SWORD IN THE STONE also completely got it—I’m very loyal to The First Movie I Ever Saw. “What’s this place? A movie theater? These are worship words.”) And Boorman made EXORCIST: HERETIC II, a movie I love. HOPE AND GLORY is movie I remember liking quite a bit.
That said, the only chemical rush IN MY COUNTRY produces is the anger-adrenalin that floods my system when I realize I’ve had my time wasted. Look, I’m unhappy to be writing a negative review of this movie. I honor the events it’s about. I believe making a film about those events is a noble and worthy aspiration; the material, the history and all the human misery it documents deserved a great movie. This movie is not a great movie, it’s a banal mess. In fact, it’s exemplary of the worst kind uninspired filmmaking. What went wrong here?

Not the direction or cinematography, and not the performances. Juliet Binoche, who’s performance in Blue is nuanced and perfect. In this movie she plays an Afrikaner woman whose relatively innocent and progressive life is depicted as being built on the misery of the black Africans around her living in Apartheid. You know the argument: because I buy sneakers here in America I’m guilty for some factory owner in China underpaying and overworking kids. If you’ve seen the pill scene in Blue, you know the kind of bewildered pain she’s going for here. Her own optimistic temperament and fundamental belief that “everything will work out” is depicted as being nothing more than denial of the evil system she lives within. She’s lovely and honest in this role and I even got used to her Afrikaaner accent.
Sam Jackson gives what may be my favorite performance of his in this movie (sigh, all right, with the exception of any QT movie he’s made). He FINALLY tones it down and gives a really great human performance in this movie. The character he plays is an African-American reporter for the Washington Post, and he gives a believable performance as a man who himself has risen up in a system which has not served his entire people well, though this issue is not dealt with well at all in the movie. If they’d brought this out in the film in an organized way, that alone might have turned things around: but they don’t. One more note: this is the best haircut Sam Jackson has ever had. I’ve never noticed before how handsome the guy is.
About the opinions about America Sam’s character gives voice to: I agree with very few of them. For example, I’m not entirely sure whose job he thinks it is to make him welcome in the country he was born into. Is it mine? How much time am I supposed to devote to that job? I mean, this is a black American, yes, but he’s a black American who works for the Washington Post, one of the most privileged media positions in America, a position far better than anyone in my family holds (except me, ‘cause I work for Ain’t It Cool News and, there ain’t nothin’ sweeter than that). I don’t have a lot of patience for his complaints as I scramble for this month’s rent, and as my family is forced to leave Upstate New York for the first time in 140 years because there are no jobs due to outsourcing.
I suppose one problem with the film, though, is that these two are the only well-drawn characters in the movie. The rest of them, from the old African who lives on their ranch (an African Walter Brennan) to the jolly radio engineer who forms a triad (and in one scene, a threesome—one that’s totally in character for the movie, as very little happens of interest) with Jackson and Binoche, are swift sketches without depth. The big villain, a man who arranged the murders of many Africans, is just material for the hangin’ tree here. He doesn’t come on screen so that we can try to understand him, he’s there so we can have easy contempt for him. Now, contempt is what you probably would come to honestly with this guy, unless you’re a fascist: but I don’t appreciate this sort of manipulation in this case. Audience manipulation is ok in a movie that’s about nothing more than entertainment, but not here. There’s a lot at stake in getting this character right, and the movie barely makes the effort.

But the big problem with this movie is the worst one, the one you can’t get away from: the script. So, a shout out to Ann Peacock, who wrote the screenplay:

It’s no accident that I’m now the caretaker of the analysis of Ann Peacock’s story, any more than my being in New York for Ain’t It Cool is an accident. There is no way to discuss her script without discussing my friend’s. And if his script is really a botched job, then so is hers

About ten years ago, a friend of mine wrote a screenplay. He’d found some exclusive material regarding a series of trials that had taken place in another land far far away (well, not that far away) and long long ago (uh, the 1950s). The material was historically and dramatically interesting. When he dramatized them he did a pretty good job of making the interactions suspenseful and interesting.

And then the Casablanca virus took hold of him, he wrapped a love story around the stuff, and suddenly the story was unreadable. The whole reason for this story was the trials. Putting a hacky love story around them as framing material both diminished the trials’ importance dramatically and distracted the audience besides. Trials, hearings, political campaigns, are about… trials, hearings, political campaigns. That’s the reason we’re there to see the movie. When you throw a love story that’s just a hack rewrite of the same thing we’ve seen in a thousand movies, without a single interesting variation, the audience is out there treading water waiting for the next trial sequence. The trials my friend wrote about had an interesting energy all their own and didn’t need the Christmas tree lights he hung on them.

If you want to see this sort of movie done well, I highly recommend Godard’s NOTRE MUSIQUE, one of my favorite movies from last year. It has the hearings and the stops and starts. It’s also wildly inventive and imaginative. There’s no love story. You’ll live.

Anyway, let’s get this straight: good writers working on a bad story don’t make the story good. The story has to be changed to become good. If the good writer doesn’t change the story it will still be a bad story. OK? (Which should make us all relax a little about Narnia…)

So, what are the specific problems with this movie.

One, it stops and starts. As I intimated before, the trials are fascinating by themselves. They have their own kind of energy and conflict: see any episode of Law and Order. Then we stop the trials and have a scene in the development of either Julia’s or Sam’s character arc. Or we have a touch of native African culture – this is one of those movies where the happy natives break into happy native dance in the local bars at every opportunity. We’re not terribly interested in either.
Two, the love story isn’t interesting or well done. It’s painfully clear that the only reason these Julia’s and Sam’s characters are together is that it suits writer’s belief that she needs to have people shouting at each other for dramatic relief from the tedium of the trials. You know, as I’m writing this—that’s it—the writer comes off as thinking the primary material of the script is too dull to hold an audience’s attention, because, well, audience, ol buddy ol pal, you aren’t that bright. How does that make you feel? It ticks me off.

Three, the two stories never meet: all the trials become are a chance for Sam Jackson’s character to feel outrage. We don’t need to see him do it: we the audience are pretty busy being outraged by the events related in the hearings, and Sam’s angry glare is really a distraction. His glare in a few scenes is also a little too angry. Is he going to waste these mofos? No, that would be different movie, and it’s not hard to imagine, a better one.

Fourth, in the third act of the movie the big baddie reveals something, and the characters go looking for it. The movie makes this episode out to be a dangerous and brave piece of espionage, when in fact a) all they had to do was look up the address in the phonebook and b) there was no one there, yet they behave as if they’re chasing down Nazi’s in Argentina. It’s incredibly silly, a real guffaw.

These are all bad problems, speaking in terms of cranking out a drama: but there’s worse problem in the movies confused and divided heart. IN MY COUNTRY sets up the African system of justice, based on reconciliation and forgiveness, as being a system of justice superior to the Western system of payment of retribution, but, try hard as they might to sell it, you have a hard time thinking the writer or director believed it. The movies big “THE VERDICT” moment is when the big baddy gets sent to Danamora or whatever the equivalent is in S.A. The movie wants it both ways: it wants to parade around it’s p.c. love of African justice and it also wants to bring us the head of Alfredo Garcia. It’s a disturbingly cynical moment in a movie with such high aspirations, and the confusion leads like as death march the final product: two of the most distracted and bored hours I’ve ever spent in a movie theater.