Flak Magazine: Review of Lumumba, 09-17-01

Very few people ever hold the destiny of their nation entirely in their hands. Vladimir Lenin was surely one such person. Pol Pot was another. George Washington was yet another. They were perfectly suited to their time in history — unique, irreplaceable and unforgettable.

Lumumba is the story of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the newly independent nation of Congo (which went through a 30-year-period as "Zaire" before recently reverting). Lumumba was a man who could have been one of history's irreplaceable people. But his arrest and death led to another powerful man dominating Congo's history — the avaricious and ruthless dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

Lumumba tells a tragic story of a political life cut short and of a country strangled by enemies, both internal and external. Its style is almost dead serious — there are a few strained attempts at humor or emotional connection, but it feels largely like a collection of newsreels, featuring drunken soldiers, well-dressed Belgian colonists and Congolese in suits trying to form a government that works.

After a rather stunning and disturbing opening sequence, Lumumba really gets going with a disconcertingly sloppy and herky-jerky sequence of biographical background info on our subject.

When we are introduced to Patrice Lumumba, he's working as a third-class postal clerk. The next moment, he's a traveling beer salesman with an undisclosed police record. The moment after that, he's a deal-making pro-independence politician seen as a threat to the Belgian colonial regime.

Then he's running the vast expanse of the whole country. All this in perhaps 20 minutes!

Fortunately, he's a perfect human being who loves his family and gives his all for his beloved countrymen. Unfortunately, he's conspired against by unstoppable sinister forces with foreign connections.

Hold on.

Despite its fairly obvious interest in celebrating and exploring one of the 20th century's most notable and fascinating African statesmen, Lumumba gives you almost no insight into the man himself. Eriq Ebouaney's performance gives little to no insight into the man beneath the speeches — he's tired, sometimes, and he's really into caring about his family. But that's just about all we get. The guy seems like a really earnest, hard-working square.

What tribe was he from? How did he meet his quiet, completely loyal wife? What was his upbringing? What led him to be an independence fighter, a politician, an orator? Where did he get that stunningly natty suit he's wearing from the outset of the film?

Lumumba says: It doesn't matter. The guy's a saint. He works for his country so hard, he only sleeps two hours a night. But he still has time to smile at his wife, and dandle his daughter on his lap. He's great! Works hard, loves his family. Hero material. Forget about the details.

Hold on.

The fascinating part of heroism is in the details. Heroism lies within the hero's family, the books a person reads, the friends and mistakes he or she makes and the weird, idiosyncratic, borderline insane stuff that he or she does once in a while.

Despite being a biography, Lumumba gives us no such grit. Its hero is spotless, driven, strong and determined. But he doesn't seem to have a soul. He's a cardboard cutout, stomping through the brutal twists and turns of history toward a tragic ending.

After the film is over, history itself could use a bit of mending, as well.

Lumumba doesn't shatter the truth, but it certainly bends some crucial facts. It portrays the prime minister turning to Russian aid out of desperation, in the midst of a domestic crisis spiraling out of control toward secession and civil war.

It doesn't, however, show Soviet "advisers" stepping out of aircraft by the dozens (the final total was estimated at around 1,000 by a CIA station chief quoted in "The Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz") or make any effort to accurately communicate the building Cold War tension and brinkmanship that pitted the Soviet Union against the United States and its Western allies.

The film accurately presents Lumumba's helplessness and need for external support in a time of great domestic crisis; it doesn't, however, give viewers the context to understand why American diplomats might have so badly — and so reasonably — wanted Lumumba and his new friends out of central Africa.

In short, we're told one side of the story. But then, Lumumba has a strange and singularly driven agenda: Deify Patrice Lumumba. Its single-minded dedication to this task means that the full extent of Belgian colonial horror is never truly explored or expressed. The full extent of Soviet designs on Africa (as later reflected by Soviet and Cuban adventures in Mozambique and Angola) is never truly revealed.

There just isn't time.

But upon reflection, there seems to be little doubt that Patrice Lumumba was a genuinely passionate ideologue with dreams for a strong, unified, African-ruled Congo. Similarly, foreign meddling almost certainly was his downfall, leading to the cruel and lengthy rule of the dictatorial Mobutu, who is excellently portrayed by Alex Descas. Descas' performance is one of the film's real highlights. Far from playing Mobutu as a crazy, Hollywood-style villain, Descas gives the future dictator the hallmarks of a tyrant-in-training: A shifty, calculating, stone-faced will to power.

In addition to Descas' strong performance, it's terrific to see a film — any film, really — made about the horrors of post-colonial Congo, so it's hard to really knock Lumumba. Its heart is in the right place. It has a solid timeline, a strong cast and some gripping visuals.

But what it can't do is make its audience really connect with the man or the situation. In its efforts to portray a complicated and stunningly powerful human being in blocks of black and white, the shifting shades of gray are almost entirely lost. With them go the heart of the real story, and what could have been the engine of a powerful, surging, overwhelming Lumumba.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)