Whistleblower

A debut feature wins major awards at the Seattle and Whistler film festivals. It's a docudrama thriller re-telling post-civil-war Bosnian scandals (child-sex slavery and human trafficking). They were connected to a U.S. military contractor (Dyncorp), covered up by the U.N. and revealed by a Nebraska policewoman working for the U.N. as a highly-paid contract peacekeeping monitor. She's The Whistleblower, who went to the U.K. courts to seek justice for wrongful dismissal, and won her case. You can safely bet that, even if such a film was made by Angelina Jolie, it wouldn't get made by any commercially-minded American company.

Instead, it's a Canadian-German production, written and directed by Toronto-born Larysa Kondracki, mostly filmed on location in Romania. Remarkably, it attracted top acting talents for walk-on cameo parts. The Brit contingent included Vanessa Redgrave and Benedict Cumberbatch; Italy's Monica Belluci, Denmark's Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Californian David Strathairnalso appear.

Rachel Weisz is convincing as the real-life heroine, Kathryn Bolkovac, an increasingly angry professional disgusted not just by the Bosnian realities of racism, religious bigotry, sexism and callous brutality, but also by the tainted multi-billion-dollar business of international aid, corporate fraud and dishonesty, and international diplomatic connivance. As with Erin Brockavich, the twice-divorced whistleblower's personal failings are noted, but unfortunately for this woman's fight, the direction doesn't have a similar cinematic panache. It reports the horrors of the trafficking trade, but shies away from the necessary melodramatics that would better explain the policewoman's angst and anger.

This is a competent TV movie, akin to the European Storm production starring Kerry Fox as another real-life female campaigner. Worthy, but inappropriately flat.

Incendies

Although Oscar voters are less predictably schmaltzy than they used to be, they still spurn ugly reality when choosing Best Foreign Language Films. In 2011, they chose tediously well-intentioned In a Better World (set in Africa, from Denmark) rather than the French-Canadian entry, Incendies (Scorched).

Denis Villeneuve's direction and adaptation of the play by Lebanese-Canadian Wajdi Mouawad opens out what must have been an histrionic tale of a Middle Eastern woman immigrant in Quebec. Her notarised last wishes ask her grown-up twin children to visit the land of their birth, where they will meet a brother they didn't know about and learn about their unknown father.

The notary, whom the mother had worked for as a secretary, has promised to aid their searches and delivery of the mother's letters. The three travel to an unnamed Middle East country, the daughter first, learning about their mother's life and their homeland's bitter history. Flashbacks illustrate the ordeals that challenged the woman's belief in love, religion and humanity.

An audience doesn't need to know that the mother was a Maronite Christian, her lover a Muslim, and their country (Lebanon) had been devastated by decades of religious conflict, civil war and invasions. The succession of tragedies and horrors are made to feel universal by well-paced direction and editing, with quiet spells showcasing fine cinematography of harsh scrub-land and bombed urban environments (on location in Jordan). Throughout, no musical soundtrack detracts from the attention focused on the excellent cast's faces.

The melodramatic sting in the tale leaves loose psychological strands waving wildly in the viewer's imagination. They may have been topics not enough Oscar voters wanted to contemplate or honour with a top award.

Barney's version

Hungarian-born Uruguay-raised Canadian producer Robert Lantos boasts a fascinating track record of more than 30 movies since 1977. His second feature was an adaptation of the best-selling Hungarian novel In Praise of Older Women, filmed in Quebec. Canada's most successful indie producer, Lantos took 12 years to get his latest literary endeavour onto the screen: Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version.

Published in 1997, it was the Montrealer's final novel. He died in 2001, after a busy life crafting books, newspaper columns and socio-political controversies. Some critics saw his Barney, a larger-than-life Montreal Jew coping with untimely passion, irksome relatives and ageing, as a self-portrait. Much of Richler's writing was inspired by his upbringing, and debutant screenplaywright Michael Konyves captures the bitter-sweet community spirit of Anglophone Jewish Montrealers, a minority within a minority in the province.

Barney belongs to a further minority, of working-class Jews scorned by the city's upper class of Jewish "old money". His father is a lovably gauche cop (Dustin Hoffman contributing a delicately rowdy cameo that doesn't chew Giamatti's scenery), while the uncle who employs him is an embarrassingly abrupt Zionist squeezing funds for Israel. Barney runs the uncle's TV production company ("Totally Unnecessary Productions"), churning out soap operas, and one wonders why rich snobs allow their Master's Degree-holding daughter to marry Barney, and why she chose him in the first place.

Minnie Driver provides grotesquely convincing images of a bossy Jewish princess, and it's easy to imagine why Barney falls hopelessly in love with beautifully clever Miriam Grant at his painfully funny wedding party. It's never stated that she is also Jewish, and the role of perfect womanhood is a gift for English actress Rosamund Pike, whose shimmering eyes express a thousand words her dialogue doesn't include. Why she chooses babyish Barney is also a mystery to behold. He has neither the wit or charm of Woody Allen's equally egocentric characters.

It's easier to see why Jews would scorn Richler's writings and shun the movie. No anti-Semite would be allowed to create such enchantingly despicable, stereotypically Jewish personalities. To some, this movie may be hurtful satire that could only have been produced by Canadians. Barney is a much cruder and crueller version of Portnoy, and Irish-Italian Giamatti looks and acts the part of Barney well, winning the 2011 Best Comedy Actor Golden Globe (yes, the competition was slim that year).

Producer Lantos (and co-producers including his son Ari) have so far earned only a teeny fraction of the movie's $30 million budget at the North American box office. He does have the respect of his adopted homeland's top film directors: five of them took bit parts, and another Canadian talent, Richard C. Lewis (a CSI writer-director for seven years) directed the movie with stylish pace.

Admirably, the production left Barney in his native Montreal and made no attempt to Americanise the plot or its characters in order to satisfy audiences south of the Canadian border. Other members of the cast are also home-produced Canadian talents: UK-born Scott (Underworld) Speedman, German-born Saul Rubinek, and Quebecers Bruce Greenwood and Anna Hopkins. Although Jake Hoffman (son of Dustin) takes the role of Barney's son (very ably), this movie is mostly a very likeable advert for Canadian cinema.

Shake hands with the devil

"Blame Belgium" is one simplistic message to be drawn from a docudrama presenting the memoir of the retired Canadian United Nations general (1993-4) in Rwanda, whose Shake Hands with the Devil was subtitled "The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda".

The movie version, directed by Ottawa-born Roger (48 Hrs, Turner & Hooch, Tomorrow Never Dies, And the Band Played On) Spottiswoode, is a grim reminder that some European colonists left a bigger mess than they'd found when they arrived in far-flung corners of the world. Of course, the whole sorry saga of Rwanda's colonial administration, civil war, genocidal divisions, bitter class system, interfering neighbours, ineffectual United Nations and indifferent global powers cannot be told, let alone explained, in a movie that's less than two hours long.

Instead, Rwandan history is summarised in the opening credits:

" Rwanda is a small country in Africa.

For centuries its 10 million citizens viewed themselves as one people.

In 1916, Belgium colonized Rwanda, introducing a system of identity cards separating the majority Hutus from the minority Tutsis.

The Tutsis were given preference in education, jobs and power.

In 1959, when Rwanda became independent, the Hutus rebelled and took over the government, exiling and killing Tutsis.

In 1990 a Tutsi-led multi-ethnic rebel force invaded from Uganda.

French troops intervened.

The invasion ended when both sides signed a peace treaty in 1993, a treaty the UN was sent to protect."

Almost every noun and verb in italics can be disputed (via Wikipedia).

Rwanda, together with Burundi and parts of Uganda, was a feudal kingdom for a couple of centuries, controlled by the ruling class of Tutsis, who had the same ethnic background as the realm's Hutu serfs and Taw pygmies.

During the 1880s carve-up of uncolonised parts of Africa, Rwanda was allocated to Germany; it was grabbed by Belgium during WW1 and became a League/UN mandate. Both sets of colonists maintained the Tutsi-dominated class system, but Belgium switched to supporting the majority Hutus prior to independence in 1962, when Burundi was separated out. Inter-class warfare lasted from the 1950s until the 90s.

Consequently, the Canadian general's increasing despair, and clinical depression arising from his impotent tour of UN duty, can be attributed to everyone's failure to understand that Rwanda was a feudal society on a par with many others (from Fiji and Iran to Nepal and Cambodia, the UK and Liberia to Haiti and Latin America) in which a self-appointed social elite ran things for their own benefit, as the Tutsis still do in Rwanda. All concerned in the 1990s blithely blamed "Hutu extremists" without wondering what had driven them to such bloodthirsty extremes.

The C$11-million docudrama primarily targeted TV and cable audiences in Canada, where the politically aroused lieutenant-general became a popular figure, best-seller and senator: Romeo Dallaire (played by lookalike Roy Dupuis). His naivety and the developed world's mendacity are well depicted and Rwanda's scenery is presented picturesquely, but this movie is a pitifully inadequate glimpse at a socio-political mess the Belgians and the UN stumbled into and out of.