February 19, 1988 | In Cry Freedom, a stirring melodrama of epic proportions, director Richard Attenborough doesn’t pretend to be fair, or reasonable, or well-balanced. This is a movie where someone snarls, “The law is on my side,” and somebody else replies, ‘”Well, justice is on mine,’” and you know right away which side you are supposed to be on.
Attenborough wants to arouse and even anger his audience with an unabashedly didactic, full-scale assault on the South African institution of apartheid. He wants to make us see this soul-killing system as a monstrous crime against nature, as terrifying in its naked ferocity as a frothing police dog barking at a screaming baby.
With devastating accuracy, Attenborough succeeds in scoring his points. And, perhaps even more important, he tells a hell of a gripping story in the bargain.
Of course, some people might question, with ample justification, whether this particular story is the one Attenborough should have told. But if you accept Cry Freedom for what it is, an emotionally-charged melodrama made with one eye on good intentions and another eye on the box office, you can savor the film as slickly entertaining commercial moviemaking at its most socially enlightened.
Scriptwriter John Briley, who previously collaborated with Attenborough on the Oscar-winning Gandhi, has fashioned a fascinating narrative from two books by South African emigre Donald Woods. Cry Freedom is the fact-based story of Woods’ relationship with Stephen Biko, the charismatic black leader who was martyred for his activism, and Woods’ subsequent efforts to get news of Biko’s murder to the world. This is very much a film from the viewpoint of Woods, a white liberal newspaper publisher who paid dearly for having his consciousness raised. Through his eyes, we view Biko as larger than life, even in death.
Woods, played with sincerity and steely resolve by Kevin Kline, first meets Biko shortly after the newspaperman editorializes against Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement. Profoundly suspicious of “black radicalism,” Woods fears Biko and his followers are reverse racists. Worse, Biko has been “banned” by the South African government, forced to live under virtual house arrest because of his political activities. Surely, Woods figures, such a man must be dangerous.
Still, Woods jumps at the chance to meet Biko, even though “banned” individuals are forbidden to grant interviews to the press. Attenborough lays it on a bit thick when Biko makes his first entrance: Backlit with a dramatic bright glow, the black activist appears much the same way Jesus Christ did in early biblical epics. Fortunately, Denzel Washington (of TV’s St. Elsewhere) does a marvelous job of humanizing this icon, playing Biko as a proud but personable man of quick wit and nimble intelligence.
This is not some plaster saint — hit him, and he’ll try to hit you back, no matter what color you are. But neither is this Biko a wild-eyed zealot: He will offer patiently rational ideas, not angry personal attacks, when he eloquently argues with an interrogator.
Cry Freedom is absorbing as it renders the wary growth of friendship between Biko and Woods. The longer they know each other, the more they respect each other. And even after Biko dies, the victim of a brutal beating while in police custody, his spirit continues to dominate Wood’s consciousness.
But during the second half of the film, after Biko’s death is ruled an accident by South African authorities, Woods himself is “banned,” so that he cannot publish the findings of his own investigation. Anxious to protect his wife and five children from harassment, and obsessed with exposing the official cover-up of Biko’s death, Woods plots an escape.
Thus, what begins as a meeting of the minds becomes a conventional chase story. A very suspenseful chase story, to be sure. But not the sort of story one is led to expect from the first half of Cry Freedom. Attenborough seems to be saying that the most important thing Steven Biko ever did was die, and the noblest thing Donald Woods could do is tell the story of that death.
Attenborough arguably is right on both counts. Even so, the film seems more than a little out of balance. A bit more of Biko’s campaign against apartheid, and a bit less of Woods’ flight to freedom, could have helped correct that imbalance.
Attenborough and Briley are very adept at evoking the chilling paranoia of life inside a police state where officials wear the brightest of smiles while proclaiming the darkest of lies. And Attenborough is a master at scenes requiring sweeping spectacle: the mass mourning at Biko’s outdoor funeral; the bloody police raid on The Crossroads, a black shanty township; and the 1976 massacre at Soweto, which left 700 dead and 4,000 wounded, most of them young children. During the closing credits, alas, we’re made painfully aware that the deaths, and the official evasions, did not end with Woods’ revelations.
In the end, though, it’s the intimate human drama, not breathtaking spectacle, that makes Cry Freedom so compelling. Penelope Wilton gives a sharply drawn, full-bodied portrayal of Wendy Woods, supportive of her crusading husband, yet also angered by his moments of self-righteousness. She is a perfect match for Kline, who effectively plays Donald Woods as a well-to-do dilettante who is rudely shaken from his comfortable life of manicured lawns and soothing delusions. One day, he finds he knows nothing of his countrymen and their government. One day, he must take a stand.
The full story of Steven Biko remains to be told. For now, we must make do with Cry Freedom, the story of Donald Woods. It’s a riveting tale, well worth your attention.
