WHEN BAD MOVIES HAPPEN TO GOOD CAUSES

Richard Attenborough's Cry Freedom had all the makings of a great film

Movies

STEPHEN SCHIFF

You can sense it when a director makes up his mind to manufacture an Oscar winner—an unsightly swelling sets in. His vehicle is generally a fat literary adaptation or a Broadway smash or the biography of a martyr. The budget is obscene, the production lengthy and embattled. When audiences come, they come dutifully, and when the Oscars come, they are greeted the way Richard Attenborough greeted his 1982 Best Picture accolade for Gandhi: "It's not me...you truly honor," he told the yawning zillions. ''You honor Mahatma Gandhi and his plea to all of us to live in peace."

The nauseating truth is that he was right. Five years later, no one is reviving Gandhi; no one rents the videotape; no critic calls a new movie the best goldam such and such since Gandhi. Gandhi is remembered, if at all, as a good cause, not a good film. And when bad movies happen to good causes, where does that leave the good causes? In the case of Gandhi or John Sayles's tedious Matewan or a dozen others, it doesn't matter much: those movies genuflect in the general direction of sweetness and light without rubbing against anything very urgent. But Attenborough's new twoand-a-half-hour epic is different. Cry Freedom, for which the appropriate Oscars are already being dusted off, is about the South African crisis. The events it chronicles—the death of the black-consciousness leader Steve Biko and the flight from South Africa of the white newspaper editor Donald Woods— are only a decade old and the horrors they emblemize still veiy much with us. We badly need an incendiary, high-profile movie about South Africa, but will audiences line up for more than one? Polished and suspenseful though it is, Cry Freedom is a flaccid piece of filmmaking; it ruins a great movie subject for everybody.

Biko alone should have made for a terrific movie: the charismatic black student leader who became an anti-apartheid martyr when, at the age of thirty, he was imprisoned, beaten until comatose, and then trucked seven hundred miles to the police hospital in Pretoria, where he died. (The Ministry of Police blamed his demise on a hunger strike.) The superb American actor Denzel Washington does for Biko a bit of what Ben Kingsley did for Gandhi. He conveys something charged and mysterious behind the eyes, as though some inner factory were crackling away back there, converting reservoirs of violence and rage into the magnetic virtue of the crusader. Wearing a goatee and straggly shreds of sidebum, Washington has somehow managed to make his squarish face look heartshaped, the way Biko's was; his teeth are fetchingly choppy, and the voice that emerges from between them has a low, musical tang. Like Kingsley's performance before it, Washington's has its own private rhythm; if this were really a movie about Steve Biko, he might have saved it. But it's not.

It's about Donald Woods (played by Kevin Kline), who met Biko in 1975, was radicalized by him, and, from his powerful position as editor of the Daily Dispatch, set about antagonizing the South African government. Shortly after Biko's death, Woods was banned—that is, legally isolated. A banned South African (Biko was one from 1973 until his death in 1977) is not permitted to be in a room with more than one other person at a time, is forbidden to write, to be quoted, to leave the district in which he resides, to enter printing or publishing premises or factories or schools. He is under the surveillance of the South African Security Police, and if he is still deemed a menace after the usual five-year sentence, he may be banned again. Cut off from his job, Woods secretly began writing a book about Biko, and when he realized what trouble its publication would get him in, he determined to leave the country. On New Year's Eve 1977, he disguised himself as a priest and fled to Lesotho; his wife and five children followed the next day. They now live in England, where Biko was published in 1978.

Woods was an active part of the South African struggle for about two years; Biko lived that struggle for the better part of his life, and is still remembered as one of its central figures. The movie treats Woods's evacuation as an act of sacrifice and heroism tantamount to Biko's own. Actually, it was one of many such escapes in the wake of Biko's death—escapes that played into the hands of the Afrikaner Nationalist government, leaving the anti-apartheid movement hobbled and in disarray for years. Woods cannot be accused of cowardice, but his is the tale of an observer, not a major participant. Attenborough's decision to focus on a white newspaperman comes to seem a failure of imagination and nerve: it's as though he couldn't rely on us to swallow Biko straight, as though he couldn't trust our compassion to encompass black anguish. He needed a honkie hero.

This tactic looks particularly grotesque in light of the movie's own rhetoric. "I just think," Biko tells Woods, "that a white liberal who clings to all the advantages of his white world— jobs, housing, education, and Mercedes—is perhaps not the person best qualified to tell blacks how they should react to apartheid." Nor, one might add, is he the person best qualified to represent South Africa's victims; Cry Freedom reminds me of the argument that everybody should start caring about AIDS sufferers because heterosexuals are getting it too. The movie's rhetoric comes at you in gushes, in cataracts, in big, foamy waves. Scene after scene finds Biko walking Woods through black townships and community clinics, spouting deep truths—' 'The only history we read was made by the white man, written by the white man"; ''I just expect to be treated like you expect to be treated"; ''We are in the struggle to kill the idea that one kind of man is superior to another kind of man"—while Woods nods piously or stares thunderstruck: jeez, why didn't he think of that before? We Americans are luckier, of course— we already know all this stuff from Peter, Paul and Mary albums. In Cry Freedom, you'll find only the wispiest hints of the real complexities in the South African struggle—of the government's perfidious use of the "homelands," of the conflict within the Black Nationalist movement, of the friction between the country's 1.5 million English inhabitants and its three million Afrikaners. Nothing is dramatized when it can be preached at us, and most of the preaching is done by Biko. He isn't a character, he's a mouthpiece.

The movie dies about halfway through, when Biko does; the screenplay, however, gasses on.

As Woods, Kevin Kline gives a restrained, earnest performance; he seems terribly awed. On the stage, he can be an enthralling actor, but onscreen he's never found a role where he can do what he does best: leap and swashbuckle and make like Errol Flynn. So the movie dies about halfway through, when Biko does; the screenplay, however, gasses on. Its last fifty minutes busy themselves with Woods's escape, which is propelled by so much false suspense and trumped-up emotion that you can almost hear the wind being puffed into its ragged sails. There are at least five good-bye scenes, replete with quivering chins and bravely quelled tears. The screenwriter, John Briley (he won his Oscar for Gandhi), throws every conceivable obstacle in Woods's path—a recalcitrant wife (the real Wendy Woods was more fiercely radical than her husband), goats in the road, noisy music on the sound track—only to be undercut by Lesley Walker's messy editing, by flashbacks to Biko telling a white magistrate that Caucasians aren't really white, they're pink (did Pete Seeger sing that one?), and by the audience's dead certainty that Woods will live to tell the tale. Then, as our hero triumphs, Attenborough seems to have second thoughts; he can't end the movie on a note of uplift, can he?—not with millions still bleeding in South Africa. So we dolly in on Woods's face while he flashes back to the Soweto massacre of 1976. Students are beaten. Tiny children are shot. And we're left with the quintessential white-liberal sensation—we feel safe, but guilty about it.

It might be argued that when bad movies happen to good causes, not much harm is done. Simplistic rhetoric is preferable to silence, after all, and even a clumsy outcry against injustice is better than none. But I'm not so sure. Consumers of daily newspapers and network news already have a more sophisticated view of the South African situation than the one this movie proffers, and for those who know nothing about such things, gulping down Cry Freedom's blend of primer-grade history and white man's burden is like taking a little poison with your vitamin. The pill is awfully pretty. The cinematographer, Gandhi's Ronnie Taylor (he won his Oscar, too), has lighted every shanty perfectly, every ravaged child just so. When the movie started, I gazed at the ramshackle Crossroads settlement it depicted, at the symmetry of the establishing shot and the subtlety of the bluegrays in the hilly background, and I found myself sighing at the loveliness of it all. Cry Freedom has a kind of neocolonial enthusiasm for the picturesqueness of squalor. It's a postcard of misery, a snapshot from a tourist bus. Come April, I'd hate to see Richard Attenborough up there again, thanking suffering South Africa for getting him his Oscar.