The path to making a good social-issue film is paved with treacherous pitfalls, and John Boorman's flat-footed new In My Country stumbles obliviously into damn near every one of them. Of course, any film railing against a historical injustice faces built-in charges of obsolescence, but since racism didn't disappear following the end of legal segregation in America and South Africa, In My Country still has an opportunity to comment meaningfully on the aftereffects of decades of brutal race-based oppression. Yet any social good the film might do gets lost in a soupy morass of histrionics, clumsy storytelling, overripe dialogue, and rampant didacticism.
In My Country documents the friendship and brief romance between two reporters (Samuel L. Jackson and Juliette Binoche) covering the hearings of South Africa's Orwellian-sounding Post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an agency offering clemency to certain white South Africans who provide a full and honest confession of their crimes, along with proof that they were merely following orders. Angry Black Man/dapper Washington Post reporter Jackson arrives in South Africa full of seething hostility toward the perpetrators of apartheid, while bleeding-heart lefty poet Binoche must confront the racism of her country and family. The film was originally titled Country Of My Skull, but that infinitely more evocative name belongs to a more fearless, raw, provocative film.
In My Country pays lip service to the ambiguity and complexity of life under apartheid, but its script reduces black South Africa to an undifferentiated mass of noble suffering, and the white perpetrators to clammy variations on evil–some of it banal, some of it sneering and over-the-top, like Brendan Gleeson's scenery-chewing torturer heavy. For all its good intentions, In My Country ultimately falls into the tiresome subgenre of films that measure indigenous peoples' hardships and tragedies largely by the havoc they wreak on the psyche and conscience of a sympathetic liberal Caucasian, preferably a glamorous name actor with strong international box-office appeal.