BEFORE: OK, I'm back to work for the fall semester, and August is drawing to a close. Can the fall weather and the pumpkin spice lattes be far behind? Actually, there are still three more weeks of summer, no matter what peoples' schedules say - fall doesn't start unti September 21 or so. But really, doesn't the summer end when you run out of documentaries to watch and you're just counting the days until new seasons of "The Masked Singer" and "Hell's Kitchen" start up again?
Penelope Wilton carries over again from "Operation Mincemeat".
THE PLOT: South African journalist Donald Woods is forced to flee the country after attempting to investigate the death in custody of his friend, the black anti-Apartheid activist Steve Biko.
AFTER: I know, deep down, this is an important film, and not just because it's directed by Richard Attenborough - the subject matter is important, Biko was a real guy who was probably killed by South African police while in custody, and they phonied up the autopsy and the death reports to make it seem like he died while on a hunger strike. That's a bullshit story, right?
Biko wasn't just an activist, he played a role in the development of the South African Students' Organization, and is credited with creating their ideology of "Black Consciousness", which was a theoretical way of life and value system that suggested to black Africans that they needed to reject any value systems that reduced his basic human dignity or were designed to make them feel like foreigners in their own home countries. It seems simple now, but back then it needed to be stated outright that in struggling against the Apartheid policies of white minority-ruled South Africa, all black citizens should regard themselves as worthy of freedom. It was the South African version the American philosophy "Black is beautiful." In the early 1970's the Black People's Convention was formed to call for a focus on improving healthcare and education and self-reliance in the black communities. Biko endorsed the unification of Africa's black liberationist groups to concentrate the efforts to fight Apartheid, and he must have been doing something right, because the South African government "banned" him, which meant that he couldn't leave his district, could not speak in public or to more than one person at a time, and could not be quoted in the media. Yeah, sure, that seems fair.
So it maybe seems a bit odd that Biko formed a friendship with a white liberal newspaper editor, Donald Woods, who was unable to print anything Biko said. It's kind of like the way certain state governments in the U.S. are banning books now, and while they mean well, censorship is still a terrible thing - but also, this process of banning the books just calls more attention to them. Now people want to read those books more than ever, to find out what's so juicy and "disturbing" about them. Knowing that Biko was "banned", that probably pointed out to Woods that Biko had something important to say that the government didn't want anyone to hear.
Biko continued to work for change behind the scenes, and in 1977 he broke his banning order by traveling to Cape Town for a meeting with the leader of the Unity Movement, and he was arrested after being stopped at a police roadblock. While in police custody, Biko was interrogated, handcuffed, chained and most likely beaten by the police. A doctor who was obviously on the police's payroll stated that he saw no evidence of injury, and the police claimed that his death came as the result of a hunger strike, not from the fact that when they realized he was injured, they drove him not to the nearest hospital, but to one that was 740 miles away.
The film obviously takes a turn with Biko's death, but then it keeps going for another hour and a half, some of which is devoted to Biko's funeral and the findings of the internal investigation into his death, which managed to absolve the police of any wrongdoing. However, the rest of the film is devoted to Donald Woods and his family escaping South Africa (separately) and flying out of Lesotho to Botswana. Yes, this is important in the long run, because Donald Woods needs to get out of the country and tell Biko's story, but still, it's a strange turn. It would be sort of like if the last hour of the movie "Gandhi" were devoted to Gandhi's tailor trying to figure out what clothes he should be buried in, it's all kind of beside the point.
What's worse is that there are multiple flashbacks to events in Biko's life that we're shown after his death, like Biko arguing with a magistrate over the importance of the Black Consciousness. Why couldn't we watch these great scenes, filled with political debate, while he was alive, when they actually happened? It doesn't really make sense for Woods to be seen remembering those events taking place, because he just wasn't there for them, so why are they shown in the wrong time period? There's also a raid on a shantytown, following a students' strike, but it was unclear to me if this was taking place after Biko's death, or if it was another flashback. The film also opens with tanks and soldiers busting up a shantytown, was this the same event as the raid seen later, or were they two separate events? I couldn't tell.
Basically, the whole second half of this film is a big mess - the focus is on Biko's white newspaper editor friend fleeing the country, how is this more important than allowing the film to focus more on Biko himself? Isn't he supposed to be the driving force of the story? And then there's a long list of the anti-apartheid activists who died in police custody over the years, along with their alleged causes of death. Suicide by hanging, suicide by hanging, suicide by hanging, oh, wait, natural causes! Then three people in a row died from six-story falls? What kind of prison has a place where inmates can die from six-story falls? Was the prison just poorly designed, or was there a loose step in a six-story staircase that the maintenance man just never got around to fixing? This means that the activists were thrown off a six-story building by guards, right? Then after a few of those, they go back to "suicide by hanging" - really, this is just flat-out ridiculous, but not in a funny way. How was this allowed to take place for so damn long?
I've traveled all the way back to 1987 to watch this film, which got three Oscar nominations but failed to win any Oscars. And it was a box office bomb, grossing less than $6 million against a budget of $29 million. Ouch. It wasn't Denzel Washington's first movie, but it was darn close to it, he was known as more of a TV star back then, for being on "St. Elsewhere". Tomorrow (OK, the day after tomorrow...) I'm flashing forward 34 years to one of his most recent films.
Also starring Denzel Washington (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Kevin Kline (last seen in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice"), Alec McCowen, Kevin McNally (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Ian Richardson (last seen in "Becoming Jane"), John Thaw, Timothy West (last seen in "Iris"), Josette Simon (last seen in "Wonder Woman"), John Hargreaves, Miles Anderson (last seen in "La La Land"), Zakes Mokae (last seen in "The Comedians"), John Matshikiza, Wabel Siyolwe, Juanita Waterman, Albert Ndinda, Shelley Borkum, Kate Hardie, Jim Findley, Tichatonga Mazhindu, Hepburn Graham, Andrew McCulloch, Gerald Sim (last seen in "A Bridge Too Far"), Peter Cartwright (last seen in "Wimbledon"), Gary Whelan (last seen in "Dracula Untold"), Fishoo Tembo, Peggy Marsh, Julian Glover (last seen in "The Young Victoria"), Philip Bretherton (last seen in "The Fifth Estate"), Paul Herzberg (last seen in "My Week With Marilyn"), Michael Turner, Joseph Marcell, Judy Cornwell (last seen in "Two for the Road"), Gwen Watford (last seen in "Taste the Blood of Dracula"), John Paul, Louis Mahoney (last seen in "Captain Phillips"), Garrick Hagon (last seen in "Into the Storm"), Nick Tate (last seen in "The Great Gatsby" (2013))
RATING: 4 out of 10 soccer games (used as cover for political rallies)
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