I'm coming down to the end of the movies that TCM ran during the tribute to Marlon Brando as Star of the Month. Next up is one in which Brando appears, but it's a small supporting role: A Dry White Season.
Brando isn't the star here; that honor goes to Donald Sutherland, playing Ben du Toit. Ben is a schoolteacher in South Africa in 1976. Now, if you know your history, you'll remember that this was still well during the apartheid era in South Africa, when a white minority ran the country and black majority and Asian minority were second-class citizens, with blacks having it far worse than the Asians (mostly from pre-partition India; you may recall Gandhi's sojourn in South Africa in the Gandhi biopic). The racial divide means that whites are able to live comfortably; Ben has a wife, adult daughter, and young son and is able to afford a black gardener all on that teacher's salary.
The black majority, of course, has it badly. Worse, they don't like the state of their education. Although the British had held South Africa as a colony, once it gained its indepence, the Afrikaaners, descended from the Boers who had colonized the place from the Netherlands, gained power, and tried to make their language Afrikaans the dominant language. The black ethnic groups, even though they all had their own languages, were being forced to learn in Afrikaans, and started protesting. At one protest, they refuse to disperse when the police order it, and the police release tear gas and go after protesters, many of them child students. The son of the du Toits' gardener is one such person, who eventually gets tortured to death.
Ben's attitude has largely been one of benign neglect, at least insofar as we can glean from the way he's treated the blacks around him up until now. He doesn't seem to have the disdain for blacks that a lot of the Afrikaans community seems to have, and cares for his gardnerer the way wealthy whites in Hollywood movies liked their black household help, but other than that has apparently been happy to live quietly. But because of it being his gardener's son, and because of the respect a teacher has in the rest of the white community, Ben goes to a policeman he knows, Capt. Stolz (Jürgen Prochnow), to try to intercede. This gets Ben put on a list. The police and the rest of the Afrikaaner power structure had it in for the blacks, but to keep control, they also had to put down any opposition from the white community, and there certainly were dissident whites.
Ben starts working secretly to get evidence from black people, being able to move around somewhat freely since white people did have more freedom to do so. He sees a journalist from an English-language paper, Melanie Bruwer (Susan Sarandon), and ultimately brings the case forward to an attorney, Ian McKenzie (that's Marlon Brando if you couldn't tell), who tries the case at the inquest and trial. Of course it's a rigged trial, and the powers that be win.
Ben's activism is beginning to radicalize him, and this means all sorts of trouble. He loses his job, and his wife is getting extremely resentful. His son still loves him, while his adult daughter joins her mother in being against what Dad is doing. And the authorities have no compunction about resorting to violence to get their way.
A Dry White Season is a well-acted movie, and it does drive home the interesting and often overlooked point that the apartheid regime had to restrict the rights of the white minority to keep its hold on power, even if those restrictions were far less onerous than what befell the black majority. Even without the rest of the world boycotting the country, South Africa would have been a gilded cage, much as was the case in Communist countries for anyone not at the very top.
Looking back 35 years after the movie was made, it's easy to say that it's pat, and that it focuses too much on white people. But it's also the case that history often has more than two sides, and the idea that there were white people on the inside who opposed the idea of apartheid was worthy of telling a story about.
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