Richard E. Grant's life must have been spectacularly insular, because there are hardly any moments when a country's native African population get any valuable screen time. Hell, GONE WITH THE WIND had three supporting characters, all black, sharing equal screen time with the film's white stars (even if this sentence sounds wildly inappropriate, there is really no other way to say it, and anyway, I am right.). In more than one instance, they also practically walked off with the scene they were in, and Butterfly McQueen's line "I ain't no nuthin' 'about birthin' babies!!" has gone into cinema history as one of the most popular quotes of the movie alongside "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn." I could even go into my own life living it in Dominican Republic, a country with a seventy-five percent mulatto population. While I went to an American-Canadian school, my life wasn't that insulated to the political unrest that was the order of the day. If I would have to ever write anything about life in the Dominican Republic from 1979 - 1996 I would and could not exclude an entire population in lieu of creating a pretty soap opera about familial divorce... which is exactly what WAH-WAH turns out to be for its entire run. Not that this is a bad thing, but aside from this glaring discrepancy, there isn't much else going for a story that tries to have depth, tries to focus on the fall of an empire, and succeeds in doing neither.
