Beasts of No Nation, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, who is of Japanese-Swedish descent, is a movie that deserves an honorable mention among films made in 2015.
On January 30th, Idris Elba won the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) award for best supporting actor. Elba, playing the role of fortune hunting, murdering, butchering ‘commandant’ of a group of mostly child soldiers, is superbly efficient in bringing out the ruthlessness such a character demands. He, however, failed to get an Oscar nomination.
Beasts of No Nation is harrowing and is an effective nightmare, and a solid piece of filmmaking. It is hard to watch but impossible to forget. It brings out the ambiguity of ideals proclaimed by all the warring parties in West Africa and sorrowful tale of child soldiers. The screenplay makes it clear that the rebellions in various parts of Africa are driven by ulterior motives (read fortune hunting) and all the talk of common good or disenfranchised people is basically hogwash.
“Agu (the main protagonist and narrator), who describes himself as “a good boy from a good family,” seems perfectly harmless — a skinny preadolescence whose capacity for malice doesn’t extend beyond pranks directed at his vain, girl-crazy older brother. But the most heartbreaking thing about Beasts of No Nation is that both Agu and the Commandant are right. The line between innocence and evil is thinner than the blade of a machete.
Fukunaga’s script is based on Uzodinma Iweala’s 2005 novel of the same name, and follows a West African boy, Agu (Abraham Attah), who’s torn from his family by militants and eventually inducted into a mercenary unit by a charismatic, unnamed Commandant (Idris Elba). This is a film much more concerned with the business of indoctrination than the details of whatever conflict Agu is involved in. It seems that the country concerned could easily be Sierra Leone, Liberia or Nigeria but none is named.
The film opens on Agu’s peaceful life in an unnamed village in West Africa, which is quickly shattered by the incursion of a larger civil war that makes him lose his father and elder brother who are both shot along with his grandfather and his mother and younger sibling are detached from him, for good, most likely, as they try to flee the conflict zone never to appear again in the movie. Abandoned and walking through the jungle, he’s picked up by a child militia commanded by Elba’s unnamed soldier. Rather than dismiss or kill him, in the film’s most telling moment, the Commandant instructs his charges to respect Agu’s potential.
Agu is trained with weapons and asked to kill a captured man to take revenge for his father’s life. He, after some obvious hesitation, uses a cutlass to do what he is told to do by his commandant. He goes into a fast track of losing his innocence. He becomes a child soldier, learning to kill and pillage and gets hooked to ‘brown-brown’, a powerful drug made by mixing gunpowder and cocaine. Amidst all these atrocities, Agu finds a friend in the mute Strika, another child soldier.
Abraham Attah gives an incredible performance as the young Agu: one can visibly see him transform from an innocent child playing with his friends to a soldier carrying an AK-47. He retains his physiognomy of a little boy but one can see the change of his demeanor, as he goes deeper into the abyss of the mindless conflict.
However, the film has limitations: many of the scenes and the brutal landscape seems generic with ambushes, late-night firefights and urban skirmishes drawn from a tried-and-true genre playbook.
“What we see is awful, but the vagueness of the setting blunts the film’s political and moral impact. It’s also strange that the war-ravaged nation remains unnamed. Imagine a fiercely realistic film about genocidal violence in the 1940s set in a place identified only as Europe. Mr. Fukunaga compensates by offering a complex inquiry into the psychology of power and the emotional logic of total war.”
But take nothing away from Fukunaga’s efforts and Beasts of No Nation is worth anyone’s while.
(The quoted portions are from A.O. Scott’s review of the movie in The New York Times)