INSIDE
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 1997 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): **
Famous director Arthur Penn (BONNIE AND CLYDE) turns his attention to apartheid in the claustrophobic new film INSIDE. Set in 1988 toward the end of the apartheid era, the film is an earnest and well intentioned story of the horrors of imprisonment during South Africa's racist regime.
Pedantic and preachy, Penn's film tries to be an almost unwatchably horrific picture and succeeds. It has a single point, which is the brutality common during that period. Penn has given us a highly repetitious movie, which in the first ten minutes chillingly illustrates South Africa's violent inhumanity and then forces the viewer to endure similar scenes again and again.
Hard to watch shows can be effective, the best recent example being PARADISE LOST: THE CHILD MURDERS AT ROBIN HOOD HILLS. Although PARADISE LOST almost made me feel ill, it was enlightening and never manipulative. INSIDE is an in-your-face movie that flaunts the atrocities. Hopefully, most viewers by now realize the despicable acts of the South African government. For those who do not the first ten minutes of the film will provide an education. The rest of the picture relies on shock value and misses a golden opportunity to teach us more.
A fictional, but quite believable screenplay by Bima Stag, centers around the imprisonment of University professor Marty Strydom, played with frightening realism by Eric Stoltz. His chief interrogator in the Kafkaesque drama is a Colonel Kruger, played by Nigel Hawthorne in a performance reminiscent of Ralph Fiennes's work as the smiling Nazi in SCHINDLER'S LIST. The Colonel explains to the professor that, "We are phasing out apartheid, but these things take time."
Professor Strydom is arrested under the Security Act which permits people suspected of a broad group of crimes, including terrorism, to be jailed without charge for up to six months. It appears that the professor may have hidden guns and bombs for a friend of his involved in terrorist activities, but Strydom refuses to talk. He is beaten senseless on a daily basis to encourage him to confess his crimes.
Although the guards are played by South Africans with heavy accents, Stoltz's accent is jarringly bad. Perhaps they should have rewritten his part so that he was an American professor teaching in South Africa.
Much of the problems in the show stem from the script's obsession with the prison cell as the venue from which to tell the story and from Jan Weincke's camera angles. Long sequences are shot from the outside of the cell with the door's two inch peephole filled with a prisoner's mouth. These talking lips cover the entire movie screen for minutes at a time. Other shots are taken from the ceiling level shooting down onto Strydom curled up in a fetal position in the corner of his tiny cell.
Although the performances are excellent and easy to empathize with, they suffer through the repetition. Periodically, the narrative starts to take off in flashforwards to the present and the Colonel's own interrogation by an ex-prisoner and now a government official played by Louis Gossett Jr. These scenes hold real potential to provide a counterpoint and meaning to the film, but Penn is obsessed with making sure that the audience spends most of its time in prison. The film's title was not chosen casually.
The script uses language to outrage the viewers. "Apartheid was not about race," the Colonel tells his accuser. "It was about culture. The Stone Age can't coexist with the Twentieth Century."
It also uses some gruesome images to arouse the audience's anger. In a show full of brutality, perhaps the worst incident shows a prisoner being flung repeatedly against the peephole into Strydom's cell. The man's blood and pieces of his flesh come flying in.
The otherwise completely plausible story concludes with an emotionally effective, but unrealistic scene. Overall, the film is efficaciously terrifying, but little more. There are many other and better films that cover the same ground as INSIDE. I left knowing little more than when I entered the screening. A lost opportunity.
In the press kit, Stoltz talks about the freedom that Arthur Penn gave the actors in INSIDE. Stoltz says proudly, "He hardly gives you any direction." Therein, perhaps, lies the problem.
INSIDE runs 1:34, but it feels twice that long. It is rated R for violence, torture, language, and a brief sex scene. It is appropriate for teenagers only if they are quite mature and not susceptible to nightmares. I admired all of the acting and I think the message of the film is important, but the show itself is almost unwatchable. I give it a marginal thumbs down and **.
**** = One of the top few films of this or any year. A must see film. *** = Excellent show. Look for it. ** = Average movie. Kind of enjoyable. * = Poor show. Don't waste your money. 0 = One of the worst films of this or any year. Totally unbearable.
REVIEW WRITTEN ON: January 3, 1997
Opinions expressed are mine and not meant to reflect my employer's.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews