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2002, Heartland /
Messenger Films. Directed by Cristóbal Krusen.
Starring John Kani, Jan Ellis, Vusi Kunene, David Lee, Liezel
van der Merwe, Mpho Lovinga, Marcel van Heerden.
Caution: Strong scenes of civil
violence; fleeting strong language; racist misuse of religion
depicted and debunked.
Final Solution weaves several stories
together against the backdrop of the last days of apartheid in South
Africa. And they are true. Gerrit Wolfaardt
was indeed a white supremacist who threw fuel on the fire of
violence and hatred until the efforts of some compassionate and
cautious heroes led him to a change of heart and mind.
And the reality of this recent history hits home
hard because of the filmmakers’ dedication
to details. A good deal of the film looks like it could be
documentary material filmed as riots, assassinations, terrorism, and
the ensuing grief and carnage rocked the dusty streets of South
Africa.
Director Christopher Krusen’s work highlights
just how people with hateful agendas take good ideas and warp them
to their own convenience, bending powerful words and language to
deceive and destroy. We see Wolfaardt being handed books like
Mein Kampf while he ignores others like Cry, the Beloved
Country. He comes to believe that black Africans have no souls,
and that it pleases God for white people to wipe them out. (The
“final solution” of the title refers to Wolfaardt’s strategy for
genocide.) Fear keeps him from looking around much—he doesn’t want
to find out that he’s wrong. Scripture verses yanked from their
context, divorced from any discussion of Jesus’ ministry and the
Apostles’ mission to all people, operate as senseless slogans, their
meanings misunderstood and perverted.
The film also turns an unflinching eye at the
violence dealt out by white supremacists on the black African
inhabitants of these neighborhoods, just as it gives us an
excruciating look at what happens when they oppressed rise up
against their aggressors. Where most cinema conspires to get its
audience cheering at acts of vengeance, this action comes across as
similarly horrifying.
It is also affecting to see what counteracts
hateful attitudes. I was afraid that the answer was going to be
“true love”… that all it would take was a woman. And the story as it
is told here does come close to that. If this were not a true story,
the fact that his romantic interest is a compassionate teacher of
South African children would seem like an unlikely contrivance.
But Celeste (Liezel
van der Merwe) serves more as a trickster than
a seductress. She knows she has his attention and his heart,
and she is clear-eyed enough to know that the answer is not to treat
him with equal and opposite aggression. Instead she treats him as a
human being of deep conviction, and decides to lure him toward
experiences that will allow him to come to the right conclusions on
his own. What a refreshingly intelligent change of pace from the
usual Teach Them Racists a Lesson story!
Wolfaardt begins to second guess his education in
hate when he begins to spend time with the South Africans and finds
his affections and respect altered by the experience. The more he
actually sees them living their lives, the more he
interacts with them, the harder it is to write them off as
lesser beings, as proper targets for an assassin’s rifle.
The film’s strongest virtue is that its
storyteller knows that the struggle against hate is not over once
the hateful man repents. There is a great deal of damage to repair.
There are habits to break. There is forgiveness to be sought. And
Krusen strives to represent that in a sort of “trial” held in the
church. (The most interesting thing about these scene to me is the
fact that it is not police that keep these hot-tempered proceedings
in order, but the presence of the press, documenting everyone’s
behavior.)
Gerrit Wolfaardt, played with sincerity by Jan
Ellis, does not quite come to life as a complex and convincing
leader of a racist movement the way Ryan Gosling did in last year’s
most riveting portrayal of racism The Believer. He seems
somehow simpler, an angry young man ready to embrace whatever
arguments give him an excuse to harden his fear of the unknown into
hatred.
But this is not so much a problem with Ellis as
it is with the script in the last act of the film. We can see how
his contempt leads to anger—anger is easy to portray, easy to
understand, and the film seems almost proud of its graphic displays
of violence. We do not, however, follow him deeply enough into his
re-consideration of matters, when Scripture suddenly takes hold on
his heart. The film makes a powerful point—that close
examination of God’s word leads to peace, forgiveness, and
compassion, not division and war. But for this viewer, the
transformation happened too quickly. We do not see much of the days
that follow, of the learning to overcome long-practiced hatred. It
is as though he is changed overnight from mean-spirited bigot into a
sincere bearded missionary.
And since Gerritt is the film’s only
three-dimensional character, it is hard for us to find the rest of
the situation compelling. Gerritt’s partners-in-crime are never more
than sketchily developed buffoons. In the last act, just as we think
things are coming to a close, we are introduced to the story of
another character, but it feels out of place.
The last act stumbles off the course of focused
show-don’t-tell storytelling and wanders into the territory
of moral platitudes and preachiness. The violent leader of the angry
South African protesters suddenly gives up his grudge, walks away
from the debate, and starts waxing philosophical about how Jesus may
have been a black man. Unlikely, and inconsistent with the
understated tone of what had come before.
Nevertheless, as a Christian film studio,
Messenger Films is setting a good example. Here is a production
company that strives to tell a good story, inspire the viewers, and
reveal hope and meaning without treating the viewer like a kid at a
lecture. They avoiding stooping to the scare tactics employed by
other Christian media forces. It is time for more Christians
involved in the media to rediscover the notion that the truth is
much more effective when people are drawn to it for its beauty and
excellence and complexity than they are when it is oversimplified
and shoved down their throats. If you can only offer stories and
visions that have been “cleaned up” of any signs of worldliness,
your audience will not accept your vision as an authentic picture of
the way things are, and they will reject what you bring them as
artificial. It is the artist’s job to hold up a mirror and let the
truth of the matter do its work for those
who stop to look closely.
For his success in adhering to higher standards
of art—for his restraint and honesty—I applaud Cristóbal Krusen. His
first film is a promising work.
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