In My Country 
In My Country: Review
Monday 08.21.2006
alice ttlg || 08:49 PM
Most of this movie is pretty standard fare, well-off white folks who deny they know what was going on when they really did but wouldn't face it with the usual comparisons to the Germans in Nazi Germany with a bi-racial romance thrown in with the obligatory "who's coming to dinner" joke. Samuel Jackson is his usual passionate self but he does have some good turns here and there. Juliette Binoche spends a lot of time with a horrified crying look on her face which gets rather repetitive and her own obligatory "must tell truth no matter what" scene is rather pointless.
The best parts are the ordinary black people talking about the savagery of the police and the ordinary policemen trying to win amnesty for their terrible crimes. The idea of forgiveness and that what hurts one hurts all of us reminded me of The Interpreter, of Nicole Kidman explaining the idea of justice and forgiveness (from the imaginary African country used in that film), that if the family of a murder victim lets the murderer die, they have justice but no peace, they'll spend the rest of their lives in mourning, but if they forgive the murderer, acknowledge that the world is not a fair place, then they'll have peace and move on from their grief.
The end of this film echoes this idea and is also a shocking rejoinder to all that has come before, unexpected, harsher and somehow more savage than all the atrocities that have been detailed in the rest of the film. I found myself caught up in those final minutes, in that one character's pain and surprise and it reminded me of the ending of The Great Gatsby:
"He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night."
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