Cary Joji Fukunaga’s drama about a boy swept into a West African civil war is beautifully made and, for an hour, close to unbearable in the right way. The second hour goes on too long and the horrors start to blur into a list.
Cary Joji Fukunaga wrote, directed and shot this adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala’s novel, about a boy taken by a civil war in a West African country the film never names. It is serious, well acted and for its first hour close to unbearable, which is to its credit. It then runs another hour and ten minutes, and the longer it goes on the less it has to add. Good, then, and worth your evening, with a warning about what the evening will be like.
The opening is the best stretch. Agu (Abraham Attah) is trying to sell an “imagination TV”, a television set with the insides taken out, to soldiers at a checkpoint: you look through the empty frame and the boys act the programmes for you. Fukunaga shoots the village in deep green and hard afternoon light, and for half an hour there is a father (Kobina Amissah-Sam) who teaches, a mother (Ama K. Abebrese), a baby sister, and a war that is somewhere else. Then it is not somewhere else. Attah had never acted before this and never seems to be acting; he watches, and the film trusts us to watch him.
Idris Elba, who also produced, plays the Commandant of the rebel battalion that finds Agu in the bush. It is a performance built on talk. He gives his boys speeches about courage and family and the enemy in a slow, rolling voice that rarely needs to rise, and what frightened us was that we could feel the pull of it from a sofa; Agu is a child with nobody left. The beret and the swagger are the easy part. The hard part, which Elba gets, is that this man is both a father to these children and the worst thing that will ever happen to them.
The craft holds up throughout. Fukunaga’s long take through a village under attack, following Agu from doorway to doorway while the shooting carries on around him, is the set piece and it earns the name: we were holding our breath without having decided to. Later an assault is filmed with the colour drained to a flat pink, after the boys have been given a drug, so the violence looks like a bad dream, which is how Agu is seeing it. Inbal Weinberg’s rebel camp is tarpaulins, looted furniture and a radio. Jenny Eagan puts the boys in football shirts and wigs a size too big, so a line of them looks like a school trip gone wrong. Dan Romer’s score is a low electronic hum under the pictures, and it never tells us when to cry.
The trouble is length and shape. Mikkel E.G. Nielsen and Pete Beaudreau have cut it to 137 minutes, and from the midpoint the film becomes a series of atrocities joined by marching. We were horrified by the first killing, as we were meant to be; by the fifth we noticed we were counting, and a film about a child going numb should not let its audience go numb beside him. Agu’s voiceover, addressed to God and to his mother, tells us what we have just seen and how he feels about it, when the pictures have usually said it already. A visit to the rebels’ headquarters in the city, where Jude Akuwudike’s Supreme Commander Dada Goodblood receives the Commandant, is the one point where the war acquires a politics, and it is over quickly.
The second half goes places we will not describe. We will say that the film handles the worst of them with a restraint some critics have called a failure of nerve, and that we were grateful for it. The ending is quieter than everything before it, and it is the right one.
Come and See (1985) remains the standard for films about a child inside a war, and it has the same shape: a boy’s face recording horrors until the face itself is the subject. Klimov holds on that face far longer than on anything the boy sees. Fukunaga shows us more of what Agu sees, and by the end we felt less. It is a good film all the same, with a fine performance from Elba and an unaffected one from Attah, and it would be a better one with half an hour gone. Watch it at home with the door shut and nothing planned for afterwards. It carries a 15, and the certificate is not being cautious.
