"The truth will set us free", 14 Jul 2005

By	M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This minor quibble aside, Borman has generally succeeded in making an earnest, heartfelt film about an important subject, even though he does tend to pack the narrative with contrived plot devices. In My Country is set at the start of the 1996 Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, where the brutal dictators of apartheid were given an opportunity for amnesty but only if they owned up and told the truth about what really happened.

It's a remarkable moment in human history when the sufferers and perpetrators of the brutal apartheid system confronted each other, and although vengeance was not exacted, the world, for the first time heard descriptions of the terrible atrocities endured along with the genuine guilt of some of the state's torturers and murderers.

When Anna Malan starts reporting the commission for a local radio station, she is torn apart by grief when she discovers the extent of her people's cruelty to the black majority. At a meeting of international journalists who are covering the story, Anna meets her metaphoric match in Langston Whitfield (Samuel L. Jackson), a surly, African American reporter for The Washington Post who brings his own irate racial agenda to the hearings.

Langston views the hearings as just another smoke screen for white superiority and for him forgiveness for the white oppressors is totally unimaginable. He angers Anna with his narrow minded and one-sided view that all White Afrikaaner's were responsible for the tortures, and she becomes livid at him for not understanding that Africa is in her soul and that she's just as African as the Blacks.

But throughout all the emotional turmoil of the hearings, they gradually warm to each other, and while Anna becomes steadily more upset at the tales of torture, Langston grows to replace anger with a despondent humanism. He also grudgingly accepts Anna's claim that she's at least as African as he is, and in many ways more so.

There's a terrific story here, but for some reason it doesn't quite pack the emotional punch that it should. The movie does a good job of recreating the court room scenes as the Truth and Reconciliation Bus travels around the countryside setting up shop in school rooms and court houses. There are choice tidbits of testimony given by a number of victims and their graphic descriptions of rape and emasculation, of tongues being severed, of genitals being electrocuted, and of burying what body parts they can retrieve of loved ones. These tales are generally affective at getting the point across.

Anna, who is married with three children, and Langston, a married family man, begins an affair. The problem is that this twist in the story effectively belittles the harrowing material and turns the movie into a type of substandard hokey melodrama. It's a plot point that proves to be ultimately unworthy of the profound and important subject matter.

As the film moves along there's lots of heavy handed sermonizing about who should shoulder the burden of guilt. In fact, no one is vindicated as Anna soon discovers a skeleton in her own family closet, while her free-spirited, fun loving black South African assistant, Dumi Mkhalipi (Menzi Ngubane), also turns out to have blood on his hands.

Binoche and Jackson don't really have a lot of chemistry together, and their motivation for having the affair in the first place remains kind of vague and unclear. Rather than keep the divisive issues of betrayal bitterness and forgiveness to the courtroom where they belong, Borman has effectively transferred them to the bedroom, and the result is an uneven, disappointing, and somewhat tepid film, that could have been much more powerful and hard-hitting than it really is. Mike Leonard July 05.

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