User reviews

Director John Boorman has taken on a weighty and incendiary subject, much like Terry George's recent take on genocide in "Hotel Rwanda." Although "In My Country" is set post-Apartheid, it still covers a hot topic: what do you do with the people that are to blame when a genocide occurs? President Nelson Mandela formed a commission to get at the truth and in return for that information he was offering amnesty for those government officers that were only 'following orders'. An amazing precedent to say the least.

However, director Boorman has chosen to balance the emotional testimony of the victims with a sometimes humorous side-story involving an American journalist, played by the great Samuel L. Jackson ("Coach Carter") and a local 'white' radio reporter, played by the equally great Juliette Binoche ("The English Patient").

Certainly, a story of this import deserves a documentary but as it stands, this is as close as any American will ever get to this story since many newspapers buried it when it originally occurred. Racism is an ugly thing, but forgiveness is a beautiful thing and this movie balances the two in an effective and entertaining manner.

Check this one out, especially if you are a fan of "Hotel Rwanda" and hearing the 'truth' for a change.

John Boorman, an interesting film maker, takes us to South Africa after Apartheid. Right after the country underwent the big change during the last decade of the last century, a commission was formed in order to hear the atrocities that were committed by the old regime, as the victims, and their families, were invited to come forward and speak to the panel that was investigating. The film is based on a novel by Antjie Krog, but not having read it, one can't really give an opinion about how true the film is to the novel.

"In my Country", the movie based on this book in its American release, came and went quickly. We tried to see it during its debut, bu it disappeared from local screens in no time. We recently caught the movie on cable.

There are some interesting aspects of what the commission was trying to accomplish in trying to bring members of the repressive force to justice. As in other conflicts, the people that were involved in the atrocities keep repeating about how they were following orders, a poor excuse, since no one owned up to having done anything wrong. After all, this was a country in which a white minority controlled a big black majority, and who wanted to keep things unchanged.

At the center of the story is Anna Malan, a white South African, who is a radio personality. She follows the commission as more and more people are coming forward to tell their stories. A Washington Post black reporter, Langston Whitfield, is also covering the process. Inevitably, both come together. While they clash at first, they find common ground in their desire to tell the truth about South Africa.

Juliette Binoche and Samuel L. Jackson are seen as Anna and Langston. Both give good performances. Brendan Gleeson is seen as the evil De Jager, a man responsible for some of the crimes committed against the poor black of the country who were deemed terrorist by the controlling whites. Menzi Ngubone plays Dumi, Anna's assistant and Sam Ngakone makes a dignified appearance as Anderson, who works for Anna's family.

The film is interesting to watch as Mr. Boorman has given us a film to think about the criminal acts that were committed by a group of people that didn't stop to consider the consequences of what they were doing.

A black journalist of Washington Post, Langton Whitfield; is sent by provocation by his boss to South Africa in order to "cover" the auditions of proceedings named Truth and Reconciliation Commission, that must decide if murders and torture authors can be amnestied if they say truth on act that they have made and express regrets in face of their victims. Langston encounters a young Afrikaner woman who follows also for South African radio the same sessions. She discovers the horror of Apartheid politics and she is bowled over by these facts. In these circumstances, Langston and Anna bring closer together. It is the story of the deep of human cruelty and also of the power of love and forgetting. The movie is dramatic and well played by Samuel L. Jackson and Juliette Binoche, but seems to be a little too oriented and melodramatic.

This movie is flawed, but it's not over-dramatic or misleading. The grieving style of the victims is very realistic. The TRC scenes are a dead ringer for the real thing, and I HAVE seen both. The idea of Ubuntu is simple and the movie doesn't "oversimplify it". It also doesn't state that all South Africans believe in Ubuntu - far from it. It's odd that so many overseas reviewers think they know that the movie is pandering to them and oversimplifying Africa. Cleary it's not simplifying it enough! Sure, having overseas actors means it's a bit foreign, but if there weren't big name international stars in it you might not be able to find the damn thing on this site. oh, and by the way, Realise is spelled with an S in Africa.

Watching any one of the three - Juliette Binoche, Samuel L. Jackson, Brendan Gleeson - painting a wall would be a good use of time. Seeing them all in the same movie is a rare treat.

Jackson (Pulp Fiction) is Langston Whitfield from the Washington Post, sent to monitor the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in South Africa. To avoid bloodshed, the commission asked white Afrikaners to appear before a public tribunal, confess exactly what they did, convince the commission they were acting under orders, make a believable apology, and amnesty will be given.

Bonoche (The English Patient, Chocolat)is Anna Malan, a poet, who is doing daily broadcasts for the South African Broadcasting Company.

Gleeson (In Bruges, Into the Storm, The Guard) is De Jager, a a South African cop with a zeal for torture and murder that went far beyond his job requirements; a reputed psychopath that is taking the fall for all the other criminals his superiors, in a new South Africa.

Anna finds out things she really didn't want to know, and Whitfield finds that truth is not so black and white, as he believed.

The performance and production is good, overall is good. its a movie about horrors that happened in south africa by WHITE people or government. The movie has some Major flaws in Side story too.

well its kinda movie about " black lives matter" thing. a married woman with kids has a job in radio. and she want to tell the truth to the country and world about the horrors happened to that country. where she met another black journalist from america. and then they both start working together to reveal more truth but also some romantic feelings which is kinda stupid. maybe she Pity soo much about black people ?.

-----------------spoilers (flaws)---------------

a married woman with two kids, sleeping with and between two black guys in same bed?

and then she kinda fall in love and didnt think about her kids? well because its not in the movie.

in the end the husband is angry but ok with everything ?

if there is no romnatic side story then this movie could done good.

It's a shame that I didn't get the emotional punch I felt as if I was supposed to have when watching In My Country, Country of my Skull to many others. You cannot force emotion and you cannot force an opinion on a film so whilst In My Country is nicely unfolded and is visually engaging for what it is, the fact that some people are pouring their hearts out in apparent regret at various points over horrific prior activity and I'm not feeling the pinch, I suppose you have to consider the film a minor failure.

But why is it that In My Country doesn't pack the necessary heat to make one identify and feel upset for the characters on screen? I think a lot of it is down to the overall approach director John Boorman adopts. The film feels like several things at once rather than an actual case-study of post-Apartheid era events that will change and affect lives just as lives were changed and affected during the era. You might argue that the best way to tackle historical issues that deal with human cruelty to other humans is to set whatever story or narrative you're doing during the actual time thus giving a first hand account of what went down and how. Many films have done this in the past but films such as The Pianist and perhaps more notably The Deer Hunter are so vast in their scale that they manage to cover life prior to 'the event'; the event(s) themselves and then the aftermath of it all through either escape or returning to their former lives before 'the event'.

Interestingly, both those films look at prisoner of war scenarios, Jews to the Nazis and Americans to the Vietnamese, respectively. In My Country is more a look at what happens after 'the event', that being the Apartheid and all the atrocities that befell South Africa midway through the twentieth century. Trouble here is that the best the rest of the world can do here is show up, look glum at a couple of press conferences in which South African men of the law admit what they did and then report on the confessions, something that one character cannot even get much space for in his respective newspaper.

As a film alone, In My Country works as a re-telling of events that happened after an atrocity but it never delves deep into its subject matter. The Apartheid and the people involved in the Apartheid are not the central characters in fact they are relegated to giving accounts at timely spaced intervals throughout the film that hope to produce the odd tear from the audience. Families of the victims bursting into tears and music native to Africa that balres up try to add to the emotion felt in these scenes. But that's about as good as it gets with the rest of it crossing genres in and out of romance, historical, melodrama and the overall approach that gets tangled up that is the docu-drama.

At its very centre, In My Country has an American journalist named Langston Whitfield (Jackson) travelling to a country to cover events few people will have an interest in. It's interesting that a film dealing with the post-Apartheid era would have an American at its core as the lead male and not a South African. There is a South African lead of sorts but they are female and they are pulled up by Whitfield on more than one occasion about the treatment they gave the black inhabitants of the nation. Here there is a confused triangle of conflict; Whitfield is American and complains about Anna Malan's (Binoche) nation's treatment of blacks but as an American he could be read into as representing America, a powerful nation that did nothing about the Apartheid anyway. Then there is the fact Whitfield is black himself and his beef with Malan's nation's treatment of blacks could just be something personal.

The fact Malan is female in the first place immediately relegates her from what she would have been had the character been male. As a male, Malan would have made a good foil for Whitfield and the personal prejudice might not have existed as much. It's no secret that women in films have always been lowered somewhat when pitted against men – indeed theorists have argued that all films are shot for the male audience in mind so women view things through a male perspective when watching a film. But the fact sexual tension is present in the film between these two adds another layer of confusion and opens up the possibility that the film could fall into the romance as well as the, shock, 'buddy' genre. They fit the bill in the sense they are binary opposites to one another (black/white; male/female; American/South African, etc.) and rebound dialogue off one another but is there really space for 'buddy' content in a film about post-Apartheid South Africa?

Twinned with this, there are other sloppy instances that aid the film in its mediocrity. When we first get an introduction of any sorts of chief villain De Jager (Gleeson), it is a visit to his house at night; complete with eerie music and we see a lot of animal heads on his wall –he must be a baddie. As well as this clumsy labelling, De Jager's press conference right nearer the end does not act as the final moral catalyst for the film but rather as a plot point for Anna's family to ultimately fall apart which was unfortunate. While it's all nicely unfolded and cute for what it is, In My Country bogs itself down with confused studies and feels like a missed opportunity.

Country of My Skull had its world premiere at the 2004 Berlin Film Festival.

One of the most eagerly awaited films of the year, coming from veteran director John Boorman, has turned out to be a major disappointment. In retrospect it is not hard to see why, it should have been predicted, but the fascinating subject matter made it seem like Boorman was going to give us that rare treat - a balanced political drama, with insight and intelligence.

The problems with Country of My Skull all originate with the screenplay. It is loosely based on the novel of the same name by Antjie Krog. However Krog's novel was a non-fiction account of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) set up in the aftermath of Apartheid. The screenplay by Ann Peacock is a mere fiction where a lacklustre romance takes precedence over the main events.

Samuel L Jackson stars as Langston Whitfield a New York Times journalist who has been sent to South Africa to write a feature on the TRC. Here he meets Afrikaans poet and Journalist Anna Malan played by Juliette Binoche. At first the pair clash over their very different attitudes but as the real life accounts of torture and suffering inflicted during the Apartheid regime are recounted their attitudes towards each other soften and they fall in love even though both are married.

This is my biggest issue with the film. Peacock and Boorman for some utterly unknown reason have seen fit to invent a romance between the protagonists. This fictional romance muddles the intent of the film and belittles the very serious nature of a body such as the Truth and Reconciliation commission. I also have problems with the use of the American journalist. While he is obviously used in the screenplay as an outsider to explain the aim of the TRC to us, the uninitiated viewers, his reaction to what he is hearing is hard to credit.

Malan and Whitfield spend the first part of the film literally sparring over every aspect of the TRC. To him, any commission that doesn?t punish the perpetrators of such crimes is worthless, while for her reconciliation is more important. She is horrified by what she hears about a country she is passionate about. This should make for very interesting drama. However the dialogue between the pair is utterly ridiculous and often sounds more like two politically correct politicians than supposedly intelligent journalists. It is idealistic, unnatural and even risible.

As part of his assignment Whitfield tracks down the Apartheid police chief De Jaeger played by Brendan Gleeson. Whitfield conducts a series of interviews with this man, which are meant to illustrate the pure evil of the Apartheid regime, however the character as written by Peacock and played by Gleeson is more like an out and out Nazi baddie than a credible perpetrator of such crimes. Boorman has spiced these interviews throughout the film. They are distracting and somewhat simplistic.

All too often the film takes pedestrian material and adorns it with simplistic political motives. The use of a flat tyre and a local bar give Malan and Whitfield a chance to spend time together and soften towards each other as they embark on an affair which becomes the centre of the film. It is hard to credit that this would happen. Why Boorman and Peacock have done this is beyond me. The type of audience that would see this movie surely does not need romance to actually enjoy a film.

The only place the film scores any kudos is in the courtrooms of the TRC where horrifying evidence is recounted to a nation. However as the other parts of the film are so weak it is easy to be cynical about these sequences as they seem over manipulative and again badly written dialogue is a major stumbling point. Their content is however undeniably powerful.

Jackson and Binoche, fine actors when given the correct material, struggle with unforgiving roles. Both characters are under-written and remote. Jackson?s change of heart about events is hard to credit. Binoche struggles with an Afrikaans accent (sometimes doing surprisingly well for someone who is not a native English speaker). However her character is not well defined and is constantly laden down with the worst dialogue.

Certainly Boorman and Peacock?s intentions were genuine, but the screenplay should have focused entirely on the TRC, allowing the drama to emanate from that. Instead we are given a rather insipid love story that reduces the impact considerably. In doing this Boorman has failed to use his excellent cast to anything like their full potential and has undermined the whole project. A lot more work on the screenplay and this had the makings of a wonderful film.

Any story regarding apartheid in South Africa or racial discrimination elsewhere is important for education in order to prevent such phenomenons again. The film shows some examples of abuses committed by the white racist authorities in South Africa, some of them brutal and abominable, as well as the indulgence of black population looking for a peaceful reconciliation. This content of the film went OK to me, but to be frankly the love story between the black American journalist Langston Whitfield (Samuel L. Jackson) and local journalist Anna Malan (Juliette Binoche) who was covering the hearings for radio seems a bit artificial or unreal. If this was a real story then one must admit that this development was not well drawn in the film. The intensity of love shown between both journalists did not leave anything to justify her comeback with her husband. She suddenly felt in love with Whitfield and in the same way (with some doubtful tears) she wanted to solve the problem with her betrayed husband. In any case, the film is interesting for those who want to be acquainted with some of the realities which happened in South Africa in the past.

This is one of the worst examples of the Hollywood dumb-down syndrome.

Made on a shoestring budget and in what looks like about 3 months from inception to release, it is a cheap and cynical film.

The book by Antjie Krog is a must-read: A deeply moving relating of the TRUE experiences related to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Ms Krog's very personal reactions to it. It's not fiction.

But by mixing silly fictional stories (such as midnight investigation of torture cells, carjackings, etc) with the genuine tragedies, the real stories have been cheapened and one wonders which is real and which is made up. This is a gross dismissal of the real pain of the victims and their families, and the real evil of the perpetrators.

The problems with this movie are never ending, and include:

1. Script - very badly written. Storyline was dumbed down with the inclusion of fictional issues, dialogue is atrocious.

2. Direction - probably the worst of Boorman's career.

3. Lighting - looks like they could only afford 1 klieg and used it all the time to get maximum value.

4. Acting - Binoche's accent kept slipping (why they couldn't use a South African for the role is a puzzle), support actors were in the main poor, Jackson was just OK.

6. Sound - not even up to the standard of a first-year film school project.

8. Editing - bits and pieces picked up off the editing room floor and glued together. It looks like a first cut, and it probably was.

7. Production - the producers must ultimately take the blame for this abortion. They took a deeply moving, thoughtful and true book and turned it into a bad b-movie without the car chases and explosions.

READ THE BOOK, and avoid the movie.

COUNTRY OF MY SKULL aka IN MY COUNTRY is no masterpiece thats for sure, but it has been unfairly slaughtered by critics who were expecting something else entirely.

The film is set against the real life "Truth and Reconcilliation Commission" set up in South Africa after apartheid in order to begin the process of healing the wounds of a divided nation.

However this commission is not the subject of the film, it is the setting. The main drama of the film emanates from the love/hate relationship between journalists Langston Whitfield (Samuel L.Jackson) and Anna Malan (Juliette Binoche).

Whitfield, a Washington Post journalist, is sent to South Africa to cover the hearings. He meets local journalist Anna Malan who is covering the hearings for radio. She trusts the commission entirely and believes forgiveness is the only way forward for her country.

Whitfield however places no trust in a system that does not punish. The pair immediately clash and begin a battle of wills.

however soon the enormity of the evidence they hear draws them together into an affair.

Boorman is not interested in exploring the TRC as a system or it's successes and failures. Instead he is more interested in its impact on his two vastly different protagonists, who must confront issues of race and gender in their own relationship as much as in their work. This is the films strength and weakness. It is beautifully intimate yet is set in a time of great social upheaval which is all but ignored.

The other major problem is that much of the early dialogue sets out to explain the political and social setting rather than define the characters. This leads to somewhat inane characterisation.

With Binoche however Boorman has struck it lucky. Her hard work is evident and although her character is poorly drawn the actresses understanding of emotion allows us to read much into her performance. Even her Afrikaans accent is passable. She displays an incredible tenderness throughout the film. Jackson however does not fair as well, giving a sullen and almost lethargic performance.

To call COUNTRY OF MY SKULL an utter failure as has been suggested by some critics is unfair. With his female protagonist and interesting setting Boorman's sincerity is beyond question and for that alone he deserves praise.

I strongly recommend this movie for many reasons: great cast, wonderful landscapes but above all such a committed movie that makes think a lot... Everything is based upon a true story, so it's all unbelievably real. Obviously something may have been adapted for the screen but what told in this picture makes one's blood run cold; tortures, any sort of physical and psychological abuses took place in South Africa for many years. What is impressive is the composure the blacks took part in the committee hearings with, after enduring all that. Basically they all accepted a general amnesty in return for nothing, 'cause they will never be refunded of lost and destroyed lives, besides power and the whole wealthiness still belong to whites who never really repented of the horrible crimes committed. So, huge dignity and courage for the victims and insincere regrets for the executioners. Another theme treated in the film is the responsibility of whites not directly involved in apartheid-era repressions but who did know everything. Are they guilty? The director seems to be in favor of the positive answer since every white was brought up in families where they FELT racism everywhere and all the time, so how could this all be unknown to them? I agree, also in my opinion those who didn't see wanted to ignore all that stuff.

A movie about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings established by Nelson Mandela after he became South Africa's president with the end of the apartheid era should be powerful and riveting. What a surprise to tune into this movie that features good actors such as Samuel L. Jackson and Juliette Binoche in the leads and discover that this movie is neither powerful nor riveting. Instead, it lacks any real depth about the hearings - of which we are given snippets but little real context, or vignettes but little substantial content and it chooses for some absolutely inexplicable reason to focus far too heavily on a completely unnecessary romance that develops between those two leads.

Jackson and Binoche play American newspaper reporter Langston Whitfield and South African radio reporter Anna Malan respectively. There was some potential for reflection in these characters and their relationship - had it been kept on a more professional level. They were perhaps a bit too one-dimensional, but in the one-dimensional characters there was some interesting material. Anna deals with being a white person in a country so long oppressed by white people, and even though she herself acknowledged the evils of apartheid, she also grew up as a child of some privilege under the apartheid regime who now, through her reporting, seems to be trying to make her own amends as she covers the Commission (even as she creates tensions with her own family by doing so.) Much more could have been done with her character than was done. Jackson's character, in my opinion, was even more shallow. He seems to have little journalistic detachment. He has a chip on his shoulder about the Commission, deploring the goal of the proceedings, which was to bring about if not forgiveness at least reconciliation, and instead wondering why this isn't about punishment. His "chip" seems based more on his own treatment as a black American back home than on the feelings of the black South Africans he encounters. There was an interesting reflection that began (but was then largely discarded) about the fact that the white Anna knew far more about Africa and being an African than the African-American Langston. Langston's series of interview with De Jager (Brendan Gleeson) - apparently a high ranking security official in the apartheid regime - were scattered throughout the movie and didn't really do much to push the story along, aside from giving us a apartheid-era figure who didn't really seem all that repentant.

So much more could have been done with this than was done, and so much was done with this (especially the Langston-Anna romance) that shouldn't have been done. (5/10)

In conventional film making, producers think that political problems always have to be shown through a story. Mostly some kind of love story. The individual is always much more important than the masses, according to that liberal ideology.

That's the problem with "Country on my Skull". The testimonies from the victims of apartheid come second to the story between the Africaan woman and the Afro-American man. That's violating what ought to be the main issue here.

Samuel L Jackson and Juliette Binoche are both good, but their story is somewhat indescent and also typical for this kind of conventional film-making.

Unfortunately, it was dreadful. I could not believe that a movie so poorly written, superficially thought out and painfully acted could be the product of the man who gave us "Excalibur."

The problem, I think, is that regardless of how weighty or factually based the subject matter, there is simply no substitute for the care and attention which go into honing a script, nuanced performances and overall subtlety.

The film resembled something rather like an inspired high school docu-drama on the horrors of Apartheid and the difficulties of the rapprochement between whites and blacks in South Africa after its fall.

I am surprised that it got only 5.8 on the score card. But at the same time should say that it is not one of my best movies. You know something, being an ex-militarily connected man, i think it says only one side story. I don't think, any war, in the world, be it between just two man, or 200 thousand man or between two countries, the so called atrocities goes on both sides. The winner always gets the good publicity. This i have always seen it. I think this picture too presents that. Please don't read in between lines, i am no supporter of aparthied, what i say is that there cannot be just only one incident, where a white man was involved and all other 27168 ppl interviewed happened to be black. I think that movie lost its genuinity at that point is my perception. They could have come equally out with incidents. And press, how much i hate them, they glorify some one overnight next day they screw them if they don't like, i think thats what is presented in this movie. i think so much of passion they just rekindle by gorifying the deaths and victims stories, but again they are wolves, they live on dead meats, we cant help them. Let them be so. Over all, the movie is a good movie, albeit few additional points they could have considered.

PS: If any of you think i am whiteman, sorry, except my white hair nothing is white on my body(of course that liquid will always be white universally, whichever race or region you belong too).

Samuel L. Jackson is a reporter for the Washington Post. He's in South Africa to cover the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and he's very skeptical. He falls in with South African poet and reporter Juliette Binoche and her assistant, Menzi Ngubane, who is also covering the commission.

It's directed by John Boorman, a film maker I admire not just for the excellent movies he has made, like Deliverance and THE GENERAL, but the ones that don't quite work, like EXCALIBUR and THE EMERALD FOREST. He tackles extremely difficult subjects and sometimes misses, but he never takes the easy, thoughtless path. Here with two fine actors in the lead, and Brendan Gleeson as an unrepentant member of the apartheid-era security forces, he shows us the work of the Commission as the five stages of grief, with various attesting witnesses often trapped, as the leads work their ways through. There are images that are beautiful, and others that are terrifying in context.

Apparently, by 2004 artistic apartheid was still being practiced in South Africa as, in this film, the black victims of white oppression must try to fit their stories in between and around Juliet Binoche and Samuel L. Jackson's love affair. It's "Mississippi Burning" all over again as a Brit director goes to a country and culture not his own and proceeds to tell the wrong friggin story. And it's all done in a rather tedious manner as we are given lots of narration when we need action (i.e. The rather dull scenes set in The Truth And Reconciliation Hearings as well as Jackson's reporter interviewing, at great length, an Afrikaaner white supremacist) with occasional flashes of interest, like a surprisingly warm hearted exchange between Jackson and Binoche's mom (well played by an actor I've not heard of named Aletta Bouzuidenhout). Beautiful music, though. Maybe too much so for the subject. Give it a C.

I thought this movie did very well in exploring many different relationships and story lines. Above all, this movie asked all of the hard questions and brought into light a lot of truth that a lot of people don't like to look at.

The African sense of justice is about reconciliation, not revenge. By using the testimonials of several individuals, this movie was very educational. The healing that was allowed to happen within the process of reconciliation was very inspirational. Their sophisticated system made a lot of sense to me, and seems much more advanced than systems employed where i live in the US.

The relationship between Langston and Anna brought a political story to a personal level. It was beautiful to see Anna come to terms with her own sense of responsibility, being a white south African who had known of the atrocities, but had done nothing to stop them. Langston forced her to examine her position, but was also there to support her when she felt crushed by the enormity. Their acting was very convincing and skillful. I especially loved the scene where Anna attacked Langston, but thought the actual sex scene could have been more believable.

One character I haven't seen anyone comment on is Anna'a assistant, Dumi. This character brought the story to yet another level. He was the classic joker with hidden depths. His character communicated to the audience that nothing is black or white; nothing is simple; really it's all endlessly complex.

In fact, this story was anything but one-sided. It showed many masks that individuals wear in specific situations. It communicated so much about humanity, both as individuals and as members of a larger society. I find it quite relevant to my experience as a white American who knows my government is responsible for the suffering of multitudes at this moment in time, and I feel responsible and helpless at the same time.

A man who sat behind me in the theater kept telling his girlfriend he wanted to leave because it was unpleasant. Yes, it is unpleasant, if you're the type of person who doesn't like to look at reality. But what I cam away with from the movie was a feeling of awe about humanity's capacity for compassion.

John Boorman continues his exploration of remote political situations by moving from an invented situation in Panama to a fictional account around the real stories told during the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of Apartheid under the presidency of Nelson Mandela. He also continues his propensity for pushing too much into a single film, attacking about three different ideas without getting them to connect particularly well. Throw in a fairly inappropriate romantic subplot, and you've got something of a mess of a film, the kind that Boorman had in his DNA. However, just like most other Boorman films, it remains an extremely interesting one despite the narrative deficiencies.

Anna (Juliette Binoche) is an Afrikaner and poet from an upper-class Afrikaner family in the wake of the political upheaval that was the election of Mandela. Despite the objections of her family, she has decided to cover the Commission for the South African Broadcasting Company. Upon reaching the center of the commission's start in Cape Town, she meets her sound man, Dumi (Menzi Ngubane), a black South African, and the Washington Post reporter Langston (Samuel L. Jackson). Langston is an American radical who sees the Commission as a way for those in the previous South African government to elude actual justice (a very real concern from certain quarters of South Africa) in favor of this idea of Ubuntu. When Anna tries to explain how she's tried to make things better despite the color of her skin, he damns her with the rest of the Afrikaners for their complicity in the regime that held down and terrorized the local black population. However, they're somewhat stuck together since they're on the same beat following the Commission around, headed by Reverend Mzondo (Owen Sejake), from small village to small village, hearing the tearful testimonies of mothers asking for the stories of their missing and presumed dead children while those that perpetrated the murders confess to them to receive their amnesty.

The film recreates some of the testimony, and it's where the film is its most powerful. Perhaps, in a dramatic context, it's somewhat artificial since it doesn't rely on anything that the film builds on its own, instead relying on the opening text that says that the testimonies are derived from real records to give it power, but that's still there. These are harrowing stories of abuse and murder, and the performances in the small roles of everyone involved sells everything extraordinarily well. And yet, the movie makes some small effort to be even-handed, which I found really interesting.

There's an embrace of complexity around the issue that I really appreciated. It's not just comic book villains versus the innocent and pure oppressed masses. Well, De Jager (Brendan Gleeson), the former colonel who becomes the film's central antagonist that Langston gets an exclusive interview with, is borderline a comic book villain, but he does also get a moment to justify himself, talking about the terrorism of communist rebels who killed and tortured a fellow Afrikaner that a movie less interested in embracing complexity would have eluded. The rest of him is borderline snarling about the supremacy of Afrikaners over the subjugated inferiors, but he does get that moment. There's also a moment from Dumi where he chastises Langston for thinking of the guilt and innocence across racial lines in South Africa as a black and white issue when there are all shades of gray. That moment interested me, but it happened so early that I began to feel like the film was wasting the potential of the character until the final moments, which did something to bring Dumi up as a complex character, but honestly not enough in the end.

So, where this film mainly stumbles is in the introduction of the romance between Anna and Langston. It feels like four quarter producer thinking to introduce a romance to attract middle-aged women to the cinema rather than an extension of what needs to happen in the film, but at least there's an effort late to tie the idea of Anne and Langston leading a small romance while lying to everyone around them about it to the idea of lies and reconciliation across South Africa, but it's so trite, reminding me of Patricia Arquette using the suffering of the poor Burmese people to get over the death of her husband and child that I can't accept it. It's just wrong in this film, and I know I'm not the first to point it out. It's still wrong for the film, though. Making the comparison between a woman lying to her husband about a small affair and men who raped, tortured, and murdered people for questionable reasons, often making disingenuous confessions of guilt designed to get them off of real punishment, demeans the larger point the film is trying to make about the messiness of justice, forgiveness, and healing after a period of pain.

Taking out the romance wouldn't quite fix the film, though. It would certainly help, perhaps just keeping Anna and Langston as platonic, kindred spirits, both finding out the depths of the horrors of the worst excesses of apartheid together from different points of view, but there's more with the film that just doesn't quite click. I think the movie's heart is with the survivors, but it's head is with both Dumi and De Jager. However, despite some early dialogue De Jager gives to justify himself, he's treated a bit too thinly, and Dumi's part in the whole pre-Mandela regime gets sidelined for way too long and then dealt with way too quickly to make it really effective. I actually think that Dumi should have been the main character because he had the most potential, trying to do his small part to fix the crimes of his past without anyone finding out about them. There's also an interesting coda to it all that the film should have dwelt on longer about how the Commission was simply never going to be enough for many people within South Africa, Dumi's fate being the key dramatic manifestation of that idea. There will never be real forgiveness across the nation, and retributive action will continue no matter the ideals of Ubuntu.

I can't help but think of Clint Eastwood's Invictus while watching, thinking about, and writing about In My Country. Eastwood's film was more purely a fantasy film, using the Rugby World Cup as an idealistic view of South Africa at the same point in time. However, Boorman wasn't interested in easy fantasy. He wanted to dig into the reality of the human experience on the ground, and his more ambitious desires got stunted more fully by his own narrative impulses than Eastwood's less ambitious desires in his own film.

The film does get helped by solid performances all around. Binoche's accent may falter a bit pretty consistently, but much like Barbara Stanwyck in The Plough and the Stars by Ford, I feel she gives a strongly affecting performance nonetheless. This might be Jackson's best performance, not because it's revelatory, but because it's pretty solidly good with some layers. Ngubane is good, but simply doesn't have enough screentime to have the effect he needs. Gleeson relishes his scene-chewing role, and he might be the most effortless actor in the bunch.

Boorman was a professional, intelligent director who often put more into his films that the films could really dramatically hold, and this is a good example of how he could put too many plates in the air. It doesn't have the wild energy of something less successful like Leo the Last or more successful like Zardoz, but it also doesn't have the more strictly built lines of something like Deliverance or Hell in the Pacific. In My Country isn't without worth, but it really needed someone with a stronger screenwriting sense to cull excesses and bring more in alignment with the overall film's objectives.