Cry Freedom

Richard Attenborough’s soggy and over-long anti-apartheid film suffers from an excess of good intentions and a deficit of structural rigour.

The risk for film-makers who try to use narrative cinema to plead a cause is that they will end up merely illustrating their ideas and the more passionate they are about them the more obvious their strategies will be.  This is the case here as Attenborough pitches the near sainted, South African anti-apartheid activist Steven Biko (Denzel Washington) and his white liberal journalist supporter, Donald Woods (Kevin Kline), in opposition to a gaggle of villainous-to-a-man Afrikaaners.  

Clearly, given the truthfulness of what is depicted, we can indulge Attenborough to some extent but his direction tends to run the gamut from diligent to heavy-handed as he sketches in the realities of a society where racism is institutionalized to an extent that it never was in the USA.  

Even more grievously, the screenplay by John Briley not only saddles the characters with pointedly moralizing dialogue but, rather oddly, kills off Biko mid-way leaving the second half of the film to tell the story of how Woods fled South Africa with his family to avoid imprisonment by the South African government.  Attenborough tries to give this a thriller-like gloss but frankly it’s a squibb.

In the leads Kline and a barely recognizable Denzel Washington do a solid job although, once again, Briley’s script is inadequate to the purpose as Woods and Biko become besties virtually overnight after bonding big time during a night out in shanty town.  

Possibly the biggest failing of the film, the irony of which no-one seems to have noticed, is that it is not really BIko’s story at all but rather that of Woods. The main focus is on the heroic white man with the blacks little more than background figures (Biko is almost entirely shown with Woods) and the film resolves with a happy ending with Woods and his very Aryan-looking family escaping to England (where he wrote the two books on which the film is based).

Sincere in its agenda Cry Freedom is but as a film it is a routine affair. .

 

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