MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Dry Season’ a Potent Look at South Africa

“A Dry White Season” (at the AMC Century 14) moves so swiftly, catching you up into its hellish chain of events, that you’re left reeling. That’s exactly the effect it should have, for no other contemporary mainstream film takes us so deeply, so unflinchingly, into the tragically divided heart of South Africa.

It combines the artistry of “A World Apart” with the scope of “Cry Freedom” and also manages to generate the kind of suspense that brings back fond memories of that definitive political thriller, Costa-Gavras’ “Z.” It is in all ways a superior achievement, the very model of what a protest film ought to be, involving and entertaining, angry rather than preachy.

In bringing Andre Brink’s novel to the screen, producer Paula Weinstein and writer-director Euzhan Palcy pull absolutely no punches; they lay bare the limitless evil of apartheid for the whole world to see.

The film, which was shot largely in Zimbabwe, opens with the Soweto uprising of 1976. A bright adolescent, Jonathan (Bekhithemba Mpofu) insists on joining a student demonstration against second-rate education for blacks, despite the fears of his father Gordon (Winston Ntshona). Jonathan’s brave decision triggers seemingly endless and ever-widening tragic consequences, and eventually involves his father’s employer, Afrikaner schoolteacher and former rugby star Ben du Toit (Donald Sutherland), who lives in a Johannesburg suburb that could pass for one of the nicest areas of Brentwood.

Right off, Palcy defines the vast difference between the white and black worlds by relentlessly cutting back and forth between the slaughter of black children in Soweto and a white children’s happy rugby match, in which Du Toit’s son Johan (Rowen Elmes) participates.

Like “Cry Freedom,” “A Dry White Season” centers on a white South African’s gradual loss of naivete and growing commitment to the struggle against apartheid. But it does so with more economy, more dispatch, and illuminates the Afrikaner psyche as no other fiction film has.

Unsparingly, but without lingering morbidity, Palcy shows us the atrocities with which whites afflict blacks on the flimsiest of pretexts. Then she allows us to understand how and why this occurs so endlessly. The Afrikaner society Palcy depicts with such conviction sustains itself on a lethal mixture of fear and indifference.

We see that Jurgen Prochnow’s steely Special Branch captain is not merely a sadist but is also consumed with fear, just as Du Toit’s wife (Janet Suzman) is. These two really believe that South Africa is their country and that they are at war with the black majority, who they are certain would surely destroy them given the chance. It’s this terrible fear that permits the most unspeakable torture and oppression.

At the same time, the whites live in considerable comfort, pursuing a stable, settled way of life with a strong sense of community that insulates them from the horrible realities the blacks must endure from cradle to grave. “A Dry White Season’s” key accomplishment is to make believable that a decent, intelligent and loving family man like Du Toit could have reached middle age and still be able to deceive himself as to the true condition of the blacks and the brutal treatment routinely accorded them.

Palcy is able to convey all this and more because she and her co-writer, Colin Welland, have written from Brink’s 1979 novel a remarkably succinct yet comprehensive and multilayered script, one of the year’s best. To be sure, there are sharp exchanges over apartheid throughout the film, but the effect escapes preachiness because the film has such a fullness of life.

Escalating slaughter culminates in an inquest, which brings Marlon Brando into the picture at just the right moment. He is there not merely to defend good against evil but to give us some respite. Magnificently bulky, he plays a brilliant, eccentric barrister of as much wit and humor as courage. In his first film in eight years, Brando fills the screen with his presence, providing a showy, pivotal distraction, allowing the film to shift gears from fiery expose to suspense thriller.

From this superbly constructed plot, we are able to see that one loving father and son--Ben and Johan--are gradually taking the places of another loving father and son, Gordon and Jonathan. This is what commitment to change really means: risking being subjected to all the dangers, injustice and suffering of those who have been so systematically victimized. It is in this melding of two worlds, so long deliberately separated, that “A Dry, White Season” becomes so stunning an accomplishment.

There’s not a false note in the performances Palcy has elicited from a large and varied cast, which includes Susan Sarandon as a tough-minded journalist; Zakes Mokae as a canny, sarcastic black taxi driver who serves as Du Toit’s conscience; Thoko Ntshinga as Gordon’s distraught but determined wife, and Susannah Harker as Du Toit’s grown daughter who wishes that everything could get back to “normal.”

“A Dry White Season” represents the high point of Donald Sutherland’s career. Never before has he had a part that demanded such range. Of his many splendid moments is one in which lets us know he is being betrayed by someone he loves. Refreshingly, the romance between Sutherland and Sarandon that would be obligatory in a lesser film is resisted here.

Five years ago, the Martinique-born Palcy made a terrific feature debut with “Sugar Cane Alley,” an intimate West Indian film of much charm and grit about a grandmother determined that her bright grandson will escape the grueling existence of a sugar-cane worker. “A Dry White Season” (rated R for violence) is only her second feature, but working on an epic scale--and in English--she displays the assurance of a David Lean.

‘A DRY WHITE SEASON’

An MGM presentation. Executive producer Tim Hampton. Producer Paula Weinstein. Director Euzhan Palcy. Screenplay Colin Welland, Palcy; from the novel by Andre Brink. Camera Kelvin Pike, Pierre-William Glenn. Music Dave Grusin. Production designer John Fenner. Associate producer Mary Selway. Film editors Sam O’Steen, Glenn Cunningham. With Donald Sutherland, Janet Suzman, Jurgen Prochnow, Zakes Mokae, Susan Sarandon, Marlon Brando, Winston Ntshona, Thoko Ntshinga, John Kani, Rowen Elmes, Susannah Harker, Bekhithemba Mpofu, Gerard Thoolen, Michael Gambon, Ronald Pickup.

Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (younger than 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian).