Beasts of No Nation
For their first venture into feature filmmaking, Netflix enlisted Cary Fukunaga (“Jane Eyre,” the first season of “True Detective”) to deliver a dramatic work that would create as much of an impact as the streaming company’s original TV series have, and with this film, he certainly accomplishes that. Working as writer, director and cinematographer, Fukunaga shows uncompromising vision and a powerful emotional intensity in bringing “Beasts of No Nation,” based on a novel by Uzodinma Iweala, to life. Originally, Fukunaga wasn’t going to shoot the film himself, but it ended up being a wonderful piece of serendipity, because the film feels less like a narrative work and more like a documentary, which is important to the overall impact of the movie.
The film, like the book it’s based on, tells the story of a young boy in a fictional West African country. His name is Agu, and when we meet him in the film, his family is living in relative peace. His father is a teacher, his brother is concerned with girls and his mother is raising his sister at home, while they all try and care for the grandfather of their family. One day, the conflict going on outside of their village comes home, and government forces come into the village looking for rebels. Agu’s father is able to get his mother and sister out, but the boys have to stay. Unfortunately for him, it’s not long after when his father and brother are mistaken for rebel sympathizers, and shot by military soldiers, Agu must run into the forest, and try and survive alone. For the first time, he must fend for himself, and he is naturally scared, especially when he sees the brutality of an army led by a man only known as Commandant (Idris Elba) up front for himself. He is captured by the Commdandant’s men, and right away, he catches Commandant’s attention, and becomes one of his child soldiers. Soon, he is one of Commandant’s most trusted soldiers, and the playful boy we see in the beginning of the film has grown up quickly into a man, and is unrecognizable after he kills for the first time.
One of the most ingenious scenes of the film is the first one, where Agu and his friends go up to an officer in their village with a TV to sell. The catch is, the TV has no screen, and it’s just the box. Agu sells it as “Imagination TV,” and seeing his friends act out various scenarios within that window gives us a glimpse of the child Agu is, making his transformation to a brutal child soldier all the more heartbreaking later on. Agu is played by Abraham Attah (making his film debut), and it’s a stunning performance. It takes courage for a director to trust the success of his film on a child for it’s lead performance, and Fukunaga (who cast several actual former child soldiers and members of various factors within the civil wars that have taken place in Africa) has a natural touch with all of the people he cast in the film that aides in the film’s authentic, almost documentary feel. The haunted voiceover Attah provides Agu throughout the film, much of which with him addressing God, as his mother told him to as she left the town they lived in at the start, has profound emotion in it that is difficult to capture in a lot of voiceover, but feels effortless in this movie. Agu is our entry point into the life of a child soldier in Africa, and it’s devastating to see him go into the heart of his own darkness. Even he knows, after he’s gotten out at the end, he can never return to simply being a child. From now on, it’s about growing into the man he will be, and what that means in light of the experiences he has under the Commandant.
Elba is the only actor people will recognize in “Beast of No Nation,” and it’s a credit to Attah that he gives the acclaimed actor a run for his money in terms of the film’s best performance. Elba’s Commandant, who is based on several actual members of the Civil Defense Forces who were consulted by the production before filming started, is not a one-dimensional villain but dangerously charismatic and nuanced. We come to understand the Commandant almost as deeply as we do Agu, and see how he is frustrated by the power structure of the fictional NDF he fights for. It’s through his interactions with Agu when we get the most vivid sense of him as a character, and Elba brings out the humanity in this monster, giving us a sense of him maybe seeing something of his younger self in Agu, making Agu’s leaving him at the end truly powerful.
Most major theatrical chains are not showing “Beasts of No Nation” because they object to Netflix’s duel release on it’s streaming platform, and while that’s not surprising, it’s also disappointing, because a film like this, with a vivid artistic purpose and striking production values, deserves as wide a release as possible. This is a visual and aural experience first and foremost, and that most people will only be able to watch it at home rather than in a theatre is a disservice to the work Fukunaga and his crew put into this heartbreaking film. This is the type of film that, if seen in a filled theatre, would have audiences sitting in silence as the credits roll. There is something to be said for being able to watch this on our own time, which will only make the streaming release all the more valuable for films like this in the future, but when theatres can choose to deliberately not book a film like this not on it’s own merits, but because it’s distributor wants to make it more readily available to people, that will make the theatrical experience all the less enticing for moviegoers when more people opt for a similar model. In that respect, nobody will win, although if the films we see get such a release are always as good as “Beasts of No Nation,” movie fans will come out ahead in the end.
