Alexandra Fuller‘s bestselling 2001 memoir of growing up in Africa is so cinematic, full of personal drama and political upheaval against a vivid landscape, that it’s a wonder it hasn’t been turned into a film before. But it was worth waiting for Embeth Davidtz’s eloquent adaptation, which depicts a child’s-eye view of the civil war that created the country of Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia — a change the girl’s white colonial parents fiercely resisted.

Davidtz, known as an actress (Schindler’s List, among many others), directs and wrote the screenplay for Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and stars as Fuller’s sad, alcoholic mother. Or, actually, co-stars, because the entire movie rests on the tiny shoulders and remarkably lifelike performance of Lexi Venter — just 7 when the picture, her first, was shot. It is a bold risk to put so much weight on a child’s work, but like so many of Davidtz’s choices here, it also turns out to be shrewd.  

Another those smart calls is to focus intensely on one period of Fuller’s childhood. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is set in 1980, just before and during the election that would bring the country’s Black majority to power. Bobo, as Fuller was called, is a raggedy kid with a perpetually dirty face and uncombed hair, who’s seen at times riding a motorbike or sneaking cigarettes. She runs around the family farm, whose run-down look and dusty ground tell of a hardscrabble existence. The film was shot in South Africa, and Willie Nel’s cinematography, with glaring bright light, suggests the scorching feel of the sun.

Much of the story is told in Bobo’s voiceover, in Venter’s completely natural delivery, and in another daring and effective choice, all of it is told from her point of view. Davidtz’s screenplay deftly lets us hear and see the racism that surrounds the child, and the ideas that she has innocently taken in from her parents. And we recognize the emotional cost of the war, even when Bobo doesn’t. She often mentions terrorists, saying she is afraid to go into the bathroom alone at night in case there’s one waiting for her “with a knife or a gun or a spear.” She keeps an eye out for them while riding into town in the family car with an armed convoy. “Africans turned into terrorists and that’s how the war started,” she explains, parroting what she has heard.   

At one point, the convoy glides past an affluent white neighborhood. That glimpse helps Davidtz situate the Fullers, putting their assumptions of privilege into context. Bobo has absorbed those notions without quite losing her innocence. Referring to the family’s servants, her voiceover says that Sarah (Zikhona Bali) and Jacob (Fumani N. Shilubana) live on the farm, and that “Africans don’t have last names.” Bobo adores Sarah and the stories she tells from her own culture, but Bobo also feels that she can boss Sarah around.

Venter is astonishing throughout. In close-up, she looks wide-eyed and aghast when visiting her grandfather, who has apparently had a stroke. At another point, she says of her mother, “Mum says she’d trade all of us for a horse and her dogs.” When she says, after the briefest pause, “But I know that’s not true,” her tone is not one of defiant disbelief or childlike belief, as might have been expected. It’s more nuanced, with a hint of sadness that suggests a realization just beyond her young grasp. Davidtz surely had a lot to do with that, and her editor, Nicholas Contaras, has cut all Bobo’s scenes into a sharply perfect length. Nonetheless, Venter’s work here brings to mind Anna Paquin, who won an Oscar as a child for her thoroughly believable role as a girl also who sees more than she knows in The Piano.

The largely South African cast displays the same naturalism as Venter, creating a consistent tone. Rob Van Vuuren plays Bobo’s father, who is at times away fighting, and Anina Hope Reed is her older sister. Bali and Shilubana are especially impressive as Sarah and Jacob, their portrayals suggesting a resistance to white rule that the characters can’t always speak out loud.

Davidtz has a showier role as Nicola Fuller. (The movie doesn’t explain its title, which hails from the early 20th century writer A.P Herbert’s line, “Don’t let’s go the dogs tonight, for mother will be there.”) Once, Nicola shoots a snake in the kitchen and calmly wanders off, ordering Jacob to bring her tea. More often, Bobo watches her mother drift around the house or sit on the porch in an alcoholic fog. But when her voiceover tells us about the little sister who drowned, we fathom the grief behind Nicola’s depression. And wrong-headed though she is, we understand her fury and distress when the election results make her feel that she is about to lose the country she thinks of as home. Davidtz gives herself a scene at a neighborhood dance that goes on a bit too long, but it’s the rare sequence that does.

There is more of Fuller’s memoir that might be a source for other adaptations. It is hard to imagine any would be more beautifully realized than this.

Film

The Deliverance
Director: Lee Daniels
Lee Daniels Entertainment, Tucker Tooley Entertainment and Turn Left Productions
Streaming on Netflix: 08.30

When I give a movie a weak review, more often than not it’s because, on some level, I feel that the director didn’t succeed at making the film they set out to make. When I given a scathing review, it’s usually because the movie they were trying to make was an awful idea from the beginning. And every so often, there’s a movie like The Deliverance that leaves me with no clue what the filmmaker was trying to achieve, yet no less certain that they failed at it. 

Ebony Jackson (Andra Day, The United States vs. Billie Holiday) is a single mother struggling with a tough financial situation and far too frequently turning to alcohol to escape her problems. Ebony and her kids—Nate (Caleb McLaughlin, Stranger Things), Shante (Demi Singleton, King Richard) and Andre (Anthony B. Jenkins, Never Let Go)—hope to have a fresh start in Pittsburgh, with the help of her mother, Alberta (Glenn Close, Fatal Attraction, Hillbilly Elegy), a cancer patient undergoing treatment and newly-devout Christian who makes no secret of the fact that she disapproves of Ebony’s life choices. The tension between the two is palpable. Ebony is temperamental and frequently verbally abuses her children, even smacking them on occasion, and a social worker named Cynthia (Mo’Nique, Precious: Based On The Novel Push by Sapphire) is constantly looking over her shoulder, and not without reason. The children have unexplained bruises, Ebony is drunk at all hours of the day and she and her mother—who was abusive to Ebony as a child—are constantly fighting. The kids aren’t exactly having the time of their lives, as Nate faces bullying in the neighborhood, Shante pines for her absent father and young Andre finds solace in an imaginary friend named Trey. And just when it seems that things couldn’t get worse, in addition to their tendency to be covered in unexplained bruises, the kids all start to display frighteningly bizarre behaviorfirst at school, then at home—including speaking in tongues, climbing backwards up the walls, sobbing uncontrollably, and eating their own feces. It eventually becomes clear to Ebony that the kids are possessed, though, of course, no one believes her, so she brings in an expert, Reverend Bernice James (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, King Richard,  Origin) to perform an exorcism. These demons aren’t going to go with out a fight (possession is nine tenths of the law, after all) and Ebony must battle the forces of evil for the very souls of her family.

The Deliverance is a disjointed mess, with much of the first half of the film being an involving family drama and shifting on a dime to become an insipid and exploitative inner city take on The Exorcist. Daniels was inspired by the Ammons haunting case of 2011, which also involved a mother using demonic possession to explain her kids frequent absences from school, as well as their bruises, and has been largely debunked. It’s very hard to get around the feeling that the film is in remarkably bad taste in regards to its treatment of child abuse, and it reaches a point where it becomes truly baffling. A message of avoiding a judgemental view of our neighbors and recognizing that we never know what a person is going through is certainly worthwhile. It’s at best questionable as to whether that should extend to giving the benefit of the doubt to an alcoholic parent who asserts, “I’m not hitting my kids, the Devil is!”. The movie is far too dark and disturbing in its depiction of real world problems to be fun in any way, yet when it moves into full on horror mode, it loses all credibility as fact-based drama, leaving the clear question: why does this movie exist? By the end of the film, Ebony’s choice to get back together with the kids’ father and “try to make things work”  immediately had me wondering if I’d just watched a supernatural take on The Parent Trap.    

Day gives an intense and riveting performance, making Ebony starkly human—even if she’s rarely likable—and she single-handedly gives the film redeeming value. Close is a legendary actress who is long overdue an Oscar, and as a big fan, it’s more than a bit frustrating to watch her reduced to seeing if she can get a Best Supporting Actress win out of playing a cancer patient on her deathbed who grows fangs when the demon takes hold and starts spouting obscenities and racial slurs. The combination of fangs and the baldness that comes with chemotherapy gives Close a vampiric appearance, and deliberately using the effects of cancer to make a character look more creepy is an odious ploy that needs to be called out. Daniels owes a lot of people an apology for this crass choice. Ellis-Taylor is effective as the wise Reverend, and in a different film it could be an effective performance, but her arrival here simply signals that the movie is going completely off the rails.  The young actors who play the kids give impressive performances, but they all deserve a far better vehicle.

The Deliverance is the kind of movie that keeps your attention to the end, then leaves you feeling used and angry when it’s over. There’s no denying that there’s a certain degree of skill  involved in the filmmaking, but it’s all put toward such an unworthy end that if anything, that just gave me more to hold against it. This isn’t the first time that a major Netflix original has left me wishing that it was getting a more substantial theatrical run, but it is the first time that my reasoning was the knowledge that it would largely be ignored in theaters, whereas it’s likely to hurt many an unsuspecting viewer on streaming. –Patrick Gibbs

Read more film reviews:
Film Review: Reagan
Film Review: You Gotta Believe 

At a time when world events are instantaneously reported on social media and news sites, it’s an enlightening, altogether gripping experience to watch a film like September 5, which depicts how a dedicated crew at ABC Sports managed to broadcast the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist attacks live to an entire nation.

Not only does German director Tim Fehlbaum’s accomplished third feature detail all the logistical hurdles the team needed to scale so they could capture the crisis as it happened, relying on massive TV cameras, smuggled 16mm film stock, a slew of walkie talkies and plenty of ingenuity. Even more importantly, the movie tackles the tough questions faced by several hardworking newsmen — and one vital female translator — as they dealt with a situation in which many human lives hung in the balance.

Those enduring questions, as well as intense, lived-in performances from a terrific cast, help to make September 5 more than just a time capsule about how the news was handled in the pre-digital age; it’s an account that speaks to our time as well.

Flawlessly blending tons of archival footage from September 5, 1972 — a day that now lives in infamy for those who were alive at the time — with uncanny behind-the-scenes creations of the ABC crew working overtime, and then some, to get it all on the air, the film focuses on the key players who fought to make it happen.

They include Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), the ABC executive in charge of broadcasting the ’72 Munich games; Marvin (Ben Chaplin), the team’s smart and testy head of operations; Marianne (Leonie Benesch), a local German translator; and Geoff (John Magaro), a young producer meant to cover an uneventful day of boxing and volleyball, who winds up landing on something much more significant.

Things start off ordinarly enough, with a sleepy TV crew settling in for their shift after a day which saw Mark Spitz famously take home a gold medal in swimming, But then gunshots are heard at the Olympic Village, which is just a few blocks away from ABC’s temporary headquarters. Geoff, who’s been left in charge while the higher-ups take a much-needed day off, soon finds himself doing everything he can to both figure out what’s happening and report it live to viewers back in America.

With the help of Marianne, who goes from being a neglected backroom interpreter to a major field reporter, Geoff and his team quickly realize that a pivotal and possibly world-changing event is under way: Palestinian terrorists, belonging to a group known as Black September, have killed two Israeli athletes and taken nearly a dozen others hostage, asking for the release of hundreds of prisoners in return.

This is all happening, of course, in Germany, at a time when the country was starting to publicly come to terms with the horrors inflicted on Jews during WWII. That history is not easily forgotten by Geoff and the others — especially Marvin, who’s the son of Holocaust victims and holds a major grudge against the Germans he comes into contact with.

Felhbaum, who wrote the script with Moritz Binder, delivers some early exposition about Marvin and the other characters during the film’s opening scenes, which kick off with an exposé depicting the ABC Sports crew at work behind-the-scenes. After that, September 5 quickly becomes a play-by-play account of how the Munich coverage came together, and it’s a riveting one to watch.

Among the many obstacles Geoff faces, one of the main ones involves getting footage of the building where the hostages are being held. Quick on his feet and unafraid to take major risks, he has his team wheel a giant newsroom camera onto a hill outside the office, while a smaller 16mm rig is smuggled — along with star reporter Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker) — into a building across the street from the Israeli dormitories under siege.

But that raises another quesiton: How do you get the 16mm footage back out of a zone under police lockdown? Geoff again comes up with a crazy idea, dressing up a crew member (Daniel Adeosun) as a Team U.S.A. athlete and having him sneak back and forth with a few film cans taped to his body. The exposed reels are then developed in an on-site lab, with one of them revealing the infamous black-and-white shots of a masked Black September member lingering outside on the balcony.

September 5 doesn’t skimp on any of the technological details — we also learn that Jennings reported events over a telephone, with the receiving end rigged to a studio mic — but Felhbaum steps back often enough to help viewers see the bigger picture at play.

What happens if Black September winds up executing one of the athletes? Should the team also capture that live on television, possibly broadcasting it back home to the parents of David Berger, an American-born weightlifter competing under the Israeli flag? (The larger Israeli-Palestinian question, however, is never raised in the film, which keeps its eyes glued to events as they unfolded back then.)

Geoff is unsure how to handle things, caught between Marvin, who becomes the crew’s moral beacon, and Roone, who’s constantly fighting both his own network and others — including CBS, with whom they share the only available satellite link — to keep exclusivity over the story. The fact this is all being handled by newsmen more familiar with sports than terrorism adds another layer of intrigue, although September 5 suggests that it’s precisely due to the team’s experience with live events that they were able to succeed so well.

Even if you know how the Munich attacks tragically concluded, the film remains suspenseful to the end, focusing on characters trapped between their desire to accomplish their jobs and their awareness of what’s exactly at stake. Magaro (Past Lives, First Cow) encapsulates that dilemma perfectly — as does the rest of the cast, with talented actress Benesch (The Teachers’ Lounge, Babylon Berlin) playing someone in a particularly tough spot, serving as a middleman between the Germans and Americans.

While the equipment back in 1972 was limited to shaky 16mm or gargantuan studio rigs, Fehlbaum and cinematographer Markus Förderer have more gear available to them now, though they keep the camerawork over-the-shoulder and intimate to better focus on the performances. Editor Hansjörg Weissbrich expertly cuts in all the archive news footage from the time, so we only see what was really shot by the ABC Sports crew instead of recreations of those images.

The gritty and naturalistic aesthetic seems worlds away from Fehlbaum’s previous feature, an ambitious sci-fi drama called The Colony. And although the director surely took some liberties with what actually happened inside the ABC newsroom, he never loses his focus on the lasting importance of reporting real, and not fake, news in the most relevant way possible.