Universal drama in the
new South Africa :
**** A REASONABLE MAN, now
showing in East London
by David Whisson, Dispatch Online, November 15 1999
A REASONABLE MAN has been hailed as a breakthrough for South African cinema, a movie that might make it onto international screens.
It has been sold to Italy, Germany
and Norway and certainly the
storyline is one which could easily
have been packaged for a Hollywood
production line.
In fact there was interest from
studios in the US, but writer, director
and lead actor Gavin Hood wanted to
do it himself and chose the
independent route with backing from
both South Africa and the UK.
He did a pretty good job of it.
Hood plays Sean Raine, a corporate lawyer who has recently returned to his native South Africa after spending nine years in England.
On a visit to an army buddy's river rafting operation in rural KwaZulu Natal, he and his wife witness what appears to be the result of a muti murder -- a young man is standing outside a hut in a traditional settlement where a ritual has just taken place.
In his hand is a bloody axe and in the arms of an inconsolable mother, the limp body of her baby.
The young man is taken to the police and will stand trial for murder. His legal aid will plead insanity.
But this is not good enough for Raine, moved by the young man and haunted by his own past, and he takes on the case himself.
A Reasonable Man is an utterly South African story, but one which is not about race, rather about belief, and whether it has a place in the law of our multicultural society.
It is also the story of a man coming to terms with a homeland he has never known and a past for which he has never forgiven himself.
Hood has gathered around himself some of South Africa's top talent such as Ken Gampu, Vusi Kenene, Ian Roberts and Graham Hopkins, as well as his wife Janine Eser to play Sean's wife, Jennifer, and veteran English actor Nigel Hawthorne who plays Judge Wendon, who presides over the case.
A Reasonable Man is well made with themes both universal and relevant to living in the new South Africa.
Like Hood's previous effort, the short film The Storekeeper, A Reasonable Man is a little overstated at times, at others not fully fleshed out.
It is way out of the Leon Shuster and Paul Slabolepszy league of South African cinema, though, and when credibility shows cracks one wonders whether one would have noticed so much were this movie glossed over in Hollywood glamour.
Either way it's both an important work in the development of the South African cinema industry as well as a courtroom drama deserving of merit in its own right -- two good reasons to catch this movie while you can.
