NEW HOMELAND

Director: Barbara Kopple

Screening at the 2019 Melbourne Documentary Film Festival, July 19-29.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ½

Even-handedness, compassion and deep insight are the broad brushstroke qualities that festival audiences have come to expect from the films of Barbara Kopple. In a career spanning almost five decades, the two-time Oscar winner (Harlan County USA, 1976; American Dream, 1990) has proven to be arguably America’s finest factual filmmaking mind, with her camera confronting pressing socio-political boiling points with an empathetic, profoundly humanistic lens. New Homeland, her take on refugee assimilation set against the backdrop of a Canadian summer camp, is amongst the very best of her work; it is verite documentary making of the highest calibre.

The government from Canada has welcomed thousands of Iraqi and Syrian refugees into their large cities in the wake of the brutal wars in their native countries. After an opening salvo of news footage that puts in perspective the horrors they are fleeing, Kopple joins two families who have relocated to Toronto and been taken under the wing of private sponsorship groups. With these Canadian residents offering financial and social aid for the first twelve months in their new country, the families can begin building new lives and dealing with the emotional scars that warzone living has left.

The focus of the documentary becomes five boys in their early-teens and the newfound sense of self they experience when they live amongst the stunning Canadian wilderness at Camp Pathfinder, in the Algonquin Park forest. The boys - brothers Hameed and Omer Majeed from Baghdad, Iraq; brothers Mohammad and Kasem Zin from Amuda, Syria; and Mohammad Darewish from Aleppo, Syria – have led sheltered lives since coming to their new country, due largely to parents who are themselves suffering various forms of PTSD and cling to the family structure as a stabilizing influence.

Kopple and her bare bones crew go bush with the boys, as they integrate with Canadian and US teens attending the idyllic 104-year old lakeside, log cabin campsite. This ‘all-American’ rite-of-passage experience, overseen by director Mike Sladden (in his 34^th summer attending Pathfinder), has adapted to act as a spiritual extension of the sponsorship program, not only welcoming in boys who have survived life in conflict zones but also respecting their religious and social traditions.

There are many stirring, uplifting moments as you’d expect from Kopple’s work; the Syrian boys emerge from themselves with strength and confidence, while Hameed learns to cope with life away from his family (and phone) with varying degrees of success. The realities are that not all children who have lived through the horror of war will be able to compartmentalize the experience and move on; Omer’s inability to socialize with the group and insistence on carrying knives and disobeying camp rules leads to some heartbreaking moments, which expose just how debilitating to a young man’s growth the grip of life in a war can truly be.

Barbara Kopple has captured pivotal moments in young lives with astonishing warmth and clarity, while slyly pointing a condemning finger at elements of Western society that seek to distance themselves from the refugee experience. New Homeland would not exist as a film in a world where compassion and acceptance were the norm, but that world seems further away than ever. One can envision Kopple’s film playing an understated but crucial role in the fight that people hoping to right social wrongs have undertaken.

THE LAST FACE

Stars: Charlize Theron, Javier Bardem, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Jared Harris and Jean Reno.
Writer: Erin Dignam
Director: Sean Penn

Rating: 1.5/5

Representing an inconceivable disconnect between the humanitarian activist we know him to be and a filmmaker capable of this tone-deaf dreck, The Last Face is a tortuous misstep for director Sean Penn. The global refugee crisis is entitled to a far more respectful and insightful account of its horrors than is afforded in this shrill melodrama, in which the displaced (and often dismembered) people of central Africa are only addressed when it benefits the turgid romance between Charlize Theron and Javier Bardem.

Shooting the carnage of tribal conflict with the kind of rich colours, ambient music cues and soft focus edges usually reserved for high-end consumer ad campaigns, Penn asks of his movie star leads the impossible – to imbue their rocky, photogenic love story with the same resonance as the hell on earth in which it unfolds. Not a chance, given that Theron’s spoilt brat daddy’s girl and Bardem’s heart-of-gold warzone lothario are two of the most objectionable characters of contemporary cinema.

Bouncing between the conflicts of South Sudan, Sierra Leone and Liberia, Theron vocalizes her South African origins as Dr Wren Petersen, the beautiful white face of global social activism. Tired of fronting conferences and boardrooms in an effort to affect minimal change, she lands in Africa to join fellow medical heroes on the ground, saving the population with their superior skills and winning smiles (amongst them are the wasted acting talents of French doc Jean Reno and Brit medic Jared Harris). Most charismatic of the lot is Bardem’s Miguel Leon, a smooth-talking playboy surgeon capable of wooing his new charge with his stubble and grin as they celebrate a successful night time jungle caesarean.

But warzone romances never go as planned, and soon Wren and Miguel are bickering, then making up, then amputating legs, crying a bit, then having sex, then riding in jeeps. It doesn’t help that Wren’s cousin Ellen (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a past conquest of Miguel’s, keeps turning up (HIV positive, to boot). It does help that the lovebird’s most emotional moments are shot in Africa’s ‘golden hour’ sunlight, the cries of the wounded silenced just long enough for both stars to emote their own pain. All that faux emoting requires some serious padding; cue yet another bloated, droning score from Hans Zimmer.      

In the hands of veteran DOP Barry Aykroyd, Penn’s visual style mimics the floaty, ethereal lens of his Tree of Life director and obvious influencer, Terrence Malick. Yet mimicry is all it is, with The Last Face offering not a single frame of Malick’s contemplative strengths (which, to be honest, have even let Malick himself down lately). Penn’s strengths used to be gritty understatement in the service of society’s fringe dwellers (The Indian Runner, 1991; The Pledge, 2001) and spiritual dreamers (Into the Wild, 2007). In his latest, Penn only proves adept at staging the grotesque horrors of third world civil conflicts; in addition to the birth scene, piles of bodies buzzing with flies and corpses, both dismembered and disembowelled, offer up the pic’s only moments of realism.

Whatever Sean Penn’s good intentions may have been, in every other regard The Last Face is the kind of misguided vanity project/message movie only the egos of Hollywood’s most powerful talents can afford to conjure.