If you hear “Goodbye Bafana” referred to, it’s probably as a movie about Nelson Mandela. Not quite right.
Actually, this film is about a man named James Gregory, played by Joseph Fiennes. Gregory, according to his own memoir, was the principal jail guard over Mandela for most of the South African leader’s 27-year imprisonment.
Gregory’s memoir has apparently been disputed in its details. But the film itself exists as a universal story about intolerance softening into understanding, with Gregory as the vessel of change.
The film begins with Gregory, an ambitious young prison warder, being sent to Robben Island, where Mandela is being held in the mid-1960s. Gregory and his wife (Diane Kruger) fold themselves in to the island’s privileged Afrikaner community.
But doubt creeps in. Mandela (Dennis Haysbert), imprisoned under tight security for armed resistance to the apartheid regime, makes an impression on his guard. Also, Gregory begins to notice that the game is rigged against Mandela.
The movie traces the years, as Gregory’s disillusionment grows. Witnessing white-on-black violence in city streets, or being forced to sneak into libraries to read the true beliefs of Mandela’s movement, turn the bigot into a sympathizer.
We all know where this is going, but Mandela’s eventual triumph is nonetheless strong when we get there.
The Euro-blend of the cast and the earnest subject matter mark “Goodbye Bafana” as something of a TV-style uplifter. So it is, and second-tier performers such as Fiennes and Kruger add to that feeling. Haysbert, the star of “24” and “The Unit,” tries hard to get Mandela but seems to be concentrating too hard on hitting just the right vocal inflection.
Still, this film is generally engrossing, in the usual manner of Danish director Bille August. Every once in a while, August makes a really excellent film (like “The Best Intentions,” from an Ingmar Bergman script), and he’s got good enough radar that “Bafana” doesn’t get too broad or too flat.
Someone should make a thorough film about Mandela, whose life has spanned enormous change in South Africa. As interesting as “Goodbye Bafana” is, it still seems second-hand.
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