‘Freedom’: Intense Look at Apartheid

“Cry Freedom” (selected theaters) is not a great movie--it’s an earnest, clunky, awkward one without a fluid sense of story and with its most charismatic figure, the martyred black South African activist, Bantu Stephen Biko, gone before the film’s 2 hours and 35 minutes are half over.

But it’s a film that illuminates the racist conditions of apartheid, and director Richard Attenborough is so unabashedly passionate to have us see its lacerating inequities up close that, for many, his movie will transcend quibbles about form. Even if one might quarrel about the subjects of the film’s last half--the white South African family--it is not they but the eloquent Biko who remains in our minds.

Attenborough and screenwriter John Briley (“Gandhi”), working from Donald Woods’ books, “Biko” and “Asking for Trouble,” set up their story like lawyers: example, argument, example, argument. Under the titles, and in sizzlingly edited segments, we witness a 1975 dawn raid on Crossroads, an illegal tin-roofed township: truckloads of soldiers, attack dogs, truncheons, a baby screaming in its crib, brutality and destruction everywhere. And following that, the official government description of the event: “There was no resistance to the raid, and many of the illegals voluntarily presented themselves to the police.”

It’s canny, persuasive film making. And so is the method of introducing us to Biko (Denzel Washington)--through his meeting and growing friendship with a white newspaper editor, Donald Woods (Kevin Kline). Initially, the anti-apartheid Woods, editor of the Daily Dispatch in East London, considers himself a liberal who believes that Biko and his Black Consciousness movement is “a black nutcase who feels he could save the world.”

One of Biko’s outspoken supporters persuades the editor to meet Biko, officially declared a “banned person.” (The almost-medieval rules of banning are explained: A banned person may not be quoted by name in the media; may not meet with more than one person at a time other than members of his or her immediate family and is forbidden to write anything--even a private journal--or to travel outside his or her banning area.)

The man Woods meets, stepping out from the protection of a tree into the dazzling spotlight of the sun--and, metaphorically, into the white public’s consciousness--is, above all, solid, intelligent, persuasive and deprecatingly charismatic. If Woods becomes an acolyte a bit too easily, in virtually the course of a few meetings, it’s probably because the film makers had a lot of ground to be covered and no time to waste.

Part of the reason the film succeeds as well as it does is the beautifully sustained playing of Washington and Kline. It will be up to Kline to suggest the enormous intellectual influence that Biko had upon Woods’ life, as well as Woods’ desperate obsession to bring Biko’s story to the world. He does just that. He also brings a self-effacing quality to the heroics of the escape section and manages to keep his equilibrium in memory scenes after Biko’s death, in which Woods gets instruction, so to speak, from beyond the grave.

Biko is a triumph for Denzel Washington, who, in a beard and with Biko’s distinctive space between his front teeth, looks uncannily like him. Playing a martyred saint can be sticky; Washington works hard to suggest the man at the heart of the speeches. He succeeds so well that after we lose Biko, it’s terribly hard to transfer our interest to Donald Woods and his hairsbreadth escape from South Africa--carrying his banned Biko biography with him.

(Actually, this transfer of loyalty is not only difficult, but it seems traitorous. A white man’s travail, even a banned white person--for by this time Woods’ writings had earned him that same honor--is so many light years away from the treatment of a black that there seems to be no comparison.)

Attenborough uses Woods’ trek, and his memories of Biko, to construct a moving if not chronologically intact final blow at apartheid. They include brilliant verbatim sections from Biko’s 1976 trial in the Supreme Court with eight other young black activists, for “alleged subversion by intent.” The full extent of the mind that was lost in September, 1977, when Biko died of injuries sustained at the hands of his captors, can be found in his patient, devastating parrying with the prosecuting attorney for the state.

However, this chronological dodging is at its most suspect when Attenborough brings on the infamous Soweto massacre as a conclusion to the film. It is one of the movie’s three big set-pieces, along with the opening township raid and the 20,000-person outpouring for Biko’s funeral. In this case, the cameras watch the trickle of white-shirted black junior high schoolers grow into a flood as they gather in 1976 to protest the compulsory teaching of the Afrikaans language.

(As in the other two epic scenes, Attenborough undercuts himself by not letting us get to know various people in these crowds. Loss on this massive a scale always runs the danger of being impersonal; the loss of one dearly loved character is astonishingly telling.)

Even as Biko is saying--in flashback--that nothing will happen to these children, the military begin their horrifying attack, shooting at them from every side. Some 700 are killed; hundreds more are imprisoned or “detained.” After the screen time spent with the escaping Woods and his sweet but undefined family, this most assuredly brings our focus back to those who continue to suffer most in South Africa. But the peculiarity of the placement of this tragedy also makes it feel as if the all-stops-out horror-finale and the intentions of the film makers are certainly more serious than that.

Technically, the film is enormously impressive, with special mention among the huge cast to John Thaw as Minister of Justice Kruger, Juanita Waterman as Biko’s wife and Penelope Wilton as Wendy Woods; to the musical score by George Fenton and Jonas Gwangwa; to the editing of Lesley Walker, and to the production design of Stuart Craig.

‘CRY FREEDOM’

A Universal Pictures release of a Marble Arch production. Executive producer Terence Clegg. Producer, director Richard Attenborough. Co-producers Norman Spencer, John Briley. Screenplay Briley from Donald Woods’ books, “Biko” and “Asking for Trouble.” Camera Ronnie Taylor. Editor Lesley Walker. Music George Fenton, Jonas Gwangwa. Sound Simon Kaye, Jonathan Bates, Gerry Humphries. Production design Stuart Craig. Costumes John Mello. With Kevin Kline, Denzel Washington, Penelope Wilton, Kevin McNally, John Thaw, Timothy West.