Far Away, So Close

LOOKING FOR LANGSTON: Samuel L. Jackson as In My Country's skeptical reporter.

A well-intentioned drama of post-apartheid healing misses the mark.

In My Country

by Sam Adams

"What have we done?" The words of the anti-apartheid anthem "Senzenina" ring through In My Country, which dramatizes the 1995 hearings of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Although not translated into English, the song's stark declaration of injustice — "Our only crime is being black" — contrasts with the commission's almost unimaginably generous offer of amnesty: Those who tortured, raped and murdered under the apartheid regime will be forgiven their crimes, provided they confess in full and can prove they were politically motivated. The gruesome recitation of soldiers becomes its own sick refrain, shifting the question from "What have we done?" to "What did you do?"

Directed by John Boorman and adapted by Ann Peacock from Antjie Krog's memoir Country of My Skull, In My Country uses the hearings as backdrop to the relationship between Afrikaans poet Anna Malin (Juliette Binoche), assigned to cover the proceedings for South African radio, and Washington Post reporter Langston Whitfield (Samuel L. Jackson), whose angry skepticism contrasts with Anna's somewhat expedient embrace of "African justice."

The insertion of international stars into a fundamentally South African story raises the specter of well-intentioned but hopelessly compromised movies like Cry Freedom and Sarafina!, whose laudable attempts to educate were undercut by the tacit assumption that only a familiar face could persuade Americans to care about Africans. To be fair, In My Country adjusts the formula substantially. Here, it's the American — or rather "African-American," as Langston pointedly reminds Anna — who wants vengeance, and the Africans, at least some of them, who want forgiveness, convinced that further violence will only deepen their country's wounds.

One a poet, the other named for one, Anna and Langston reflect the commission's elevation of storytelling to a national duty. By admitting their deeds, the guilty convert private shame into historical fact. By sharing their grief, the bereaved (including a white landowner whose wife and children were killed by an African National Congress mine) make their private anguish a public pain, a process that has less to do with "closure" than nation-building.

The trouble with In My Country is simple: Movie stars always win. Which is to say that no matter how nuanced the movie's understanding of South Africa's attempt to heal its past, it ultimately becomes a historical romance whose setting is, practically speaking, irrelevant. The movie's attempt to use Anna and Langston's extramarital affair as a reflection of the country's guilt, and particularly Anna's climactic decision to ask her husband for forgiveness, allegedly the same kind as that dispensed by African blacks whose suffering infinitely dwarfs hers, is at best misguided, more likely ludicrous and quite arguably offensive.

It's not the actors' fault: Binoche is as good as ever, while Jackson has miraculously been persuaded to drop the badass shtick. It's the movie that allows their characters to overshadow the events they're supposed to be covering. Accomplished as they are, Binoche and Jackson can't touch the wizened authority of Sam Ngakane's Anderson, a faithful employee of Anna's family who rides his bike for miles to testify. Beating a carved walking stick on the ground as he calls out the names of his ancestors, he gives the movie a sense of history it hasn't earned. Even Menzi "Ngubs" Ngubane, saddled with a thankless sidekick role as Anna's tag-along sound engineer, balances his smiling accommodation with a hint of sorrow.

A mishmash of good ideas and dreadful ones, In My Country returns frequently to shots of the South African countryside, as if to express Boorman's felt connection to the land where, according to his director's statement, he "traveled widely" during the apartheid era. But the shots, often taken from a soaring helicopter, ironically reflect the movie's tendency to keep South Africans at a distance as well as the way it eventually flies the coop.

In My Country Directed by John Boorman A Sony Pictures Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz East