MOVIE REVIEW : The Empire Strikes Back at ‘Johnson’

“Mister Johnson,” based on Joyce Cary’s wonderful 1939 novel, is a heartbreakingly beautiful movie with a deft, glancing spirit all its own. Bruce Beresford, who directed, doesn’t linger on the story’s small, sentimental nuggets; he lets the movie’s tragedy creep up on us, and the effect is both bracing and overwhelming.

It’s unusual to encounter a movie where the filmmakers, instead of clonking us over the head with two-ton sentimentalities, trust us instead to feel our own way through a movie. “Mister Johnson,” set in West Africa in 1923, is about the tragedy of colonialism, and the tragedy sinks in almost imperceptibly until it’s deep inside our bones.

Along with Beresford, screenwriter William Boyd has done a remarkable job of translating Cary’s jaunty, sorrowful tone. (The book was written entirely in the present tense, and the film, rated PG-13, has the same aliveness.)

Mr. Johnson (Maynard Eziashi), an African clerk in the government service, educated in mission schools, aspires to be the perfect English gentleman. His English superior, Harry Rudbeck (Pierce Brosnan), is motivated to build a major road through the jungle in order to provide a causeway to civilization, and Johnson, fanatically dutiful, schemes to realize the project. Diverting government funds and goading the African laborers, Johnson triumphs.

Caught between civilizations, he goes into a tailspin. Accepted by neither the British, for whom he is a comic underling, nor his fellow Africans, for whom his aping of English ways is abhorrent, Johnson ends up an outcast. When he’s discovered stealing and accepting bribes from officials of the native emirate, he sinks into a pit of poverty and recrimination.

What gives the movie (at the AMC Century 14) its overwhelming poignancy is the notion that Johnson is destroying himself for an ideal he can never hope to achieve--an ideal that is, in truth, not worthy of him. Johnson is not merely caught between civilizations; he’s lost between civilizations. He’s a marvel of spirit but it’s his very spirit, his frolicky Africanness, that dooms his attempts to become a proper British squire. Temperamentally, Johnson is the opposite of Rudbeck and his countrymen; the best that one of them--a burly shopkeeper played by Edward Woodward--can say of him is that he is “too good” for an African.

In his first significant film role, Eziashi brings Johnson’s self-mystified ebullience to rollicking life. His Johnson, while he may be crafty, is essentially an innocent. And his innocence is his undoing. He’s no match for the machinations of the British he reveres; when Johnson is no longer of any use to him, the emirate’s wily representative (Femi Fatoba) regards him as equally disposable. Johnson is a victim of his own sweet, all too trusting disposition but he’s also a victim of colonial “progress.” The road he commandeers brings the laws that will undo him.

It’s an indication of how subtle and humanly embracing this film is that we are never coaxed into regarding Johnson as merely a victim. He may be represent the white colonial destruction of the African but he’s too tantalizingly unique to be a symbolic stand-in. We don’t react to Johnson the way the British do--as a buffoon. Even when Johnson denigrates himself before them, we can locate the fierce heart that pumps him ever onward.

Johnson’s visions of glory are more transcendent than his superior’s. He has so internalized the grandeur of Empire that his missionary spirit puts the white civil servants to shame. That spirit is Rudbeck’s inspiration and, by the end, he’s moved to recognize it. The bond between Johnson and Rudbeck is so intricately worked out that the film’s final sequence is inevitably moving. It encloses the two men in an emotional closeness neither could have anticipated.

Beresford and Boyd allow Rudbeck’s decency to creep up on us with the same stealth as Johnson’s. Pierce Brosnan is a bit stiff in the role--he overdoes the rectitude and the puffing on his pipe--but at least we recognize we’re watching a cartoon rooted in reality. Brosnan is attempting something quite tricky here: He wants to show us how the English, isolated in the jungles, turned themselves into caricatures as surely as Mr. Johnson did. Rudbeck overdoes the British imperiousness as a way of making himself feel less alone, less strange. The tragedy of colonialism hits him too. Like Johnson, he’s cut off from his humanity, and he only regains it when he’s compelled to put an end to his friend.

“Mister Johnson” doesn’t sentimentalize freedom. Johnson’s free-spiritedness is beautiful but the film doesn’t deny the sense of order that might have saved him. The filmmakers recognize the lyricism of the African landscapes and the African faces but they also perceive the allure of British pomp. This approach should not be interpreted as indecisive or compromised. It’s the artists’ response to the baffling swirl of human motives. Like Johnson, they are lost between cultures. And, like Johnson, they neither fully live in nor believe in either one.

‘Mister Johnson’

Maynard Eziashi: Mister Johnson

Pierce Brosnan: Harry Rudbeck

Edward Woodward: Sargy Gollup

Beatie Edney: Celia Rudbeck

An Avenue Pictures presentation of a Michael and Kathy Fitzgerald production. Director Bruce Beresford. Producer Michael Fitzgerald. Executive producer Bill Benenson. Co-Producer Penelope Glass. Screenplay by William Boyd, based on the novel by Joyce Cary. Cinematographer Peter James. Editor Humphrey Dixon. Costumes Rosemary Burrows. Music George Delerue. Production design Herbert Pinter. Art director Fabia Adibe. Set decorator Graham Sumner. Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13 (occasional violence).