Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

There's nothing inherently wrong with telling a story about a white family set in Zimbabwe. It may even be preferable for a white writer/director of South African descent such as Embeth Davidtz, as her personal experience likely does not align as closely with native Zimbabweans. That said, any time your film centers the story of colonizers in Africa, especially in the midst of political violence threatening the security of the country's first democratic elections in decades, there's much room for misstep. You run the risk of reducing a painful situation whose long, deep scares remain today to a backdrop for the story you're actually interested in. It's a trap many filmmakers before her have fallen into, and it's one to which Davidtz also succumbs.

It's hard to know how much of that comes from her directly, as the movie is based on a 2001 memoir of the same name written by Alexandra Fuller, which I have not read. Even if it's a pretty straight-forward adaption, something is unavoidably lost in the translation from a recounting of personal experiences the author had growing up into a narrative film constructed by someone whose family moved into a South Africa still under Apartheid when she was a child. That may help to explain why the film's mentions of the contemporaneous political situation, the final days of the violent 1980 election, feel more obligatory than relevant.

Of course, it can't completely skirt the issue. At seven years old, Bobo (Lexi Venter) is too young to understand the complicated situation in which her and her family live. All she knows about why her parents sleep gun in hand is to protect their sizable farm from "terrorists". She cannot comprehend why her fondness for Sarah (Zikhona Bali), one of the black farm hands, would cause anxiety in Jacob (Fumani Shilubana), another black farm hand. Nor why the adults get mad at her for bossing around a couple young black boys when they're playing. There are a few more nuanced concepts gestured at, such as her parents' insistence that they're not African and refusal to explain why, or what it means when they say they support Bishop Abel Muzorewa for Prime Minister because he's black "but not really black". The violence surrounding the election crops up on the TV from time to time, which never fails to prompt the white adults to change the channel to something more pleasant.

The movie never forgets the racial divide, but it nonetheless refuses to comment on it, or the specifics of what's going on in Rhodesia (its named was changed to Zimbabwe after the election). This is the limitation of telling the story from a child's POV, as well as from within a family supportive of minority rule. The closest we get is the relationship between Bobo and Sarah, but there's little depth to the exploration. The rest plays out in the background as the family desperately tries to hold on to their land.

There are some indications the family is poor, but the extent of their situation is never clear. Sure, Bobo's appearance is that of a Dickensian street urchin, but the rest of the family is well-groomed. They use their extensive land to breed cattle, so it's hard to know why they would lack an income; even if black families refuse to buy animals raised by white people, what of the other white people? The movie leaves it to you to assume how they came into the land, with their history barely being hinted at beyond Jacob commenting that this was once his family's farm. As such, none of the class commentary reads as important, instead appearing to be a fact of their life that's largely irrelevant. It's too bad, as the experience of being a poor white family in a majority black country could provide interesting insight, which appears to have been the appeal of the original memoir.

Instead, the heavy focus is on her mother Nicola's (Davidtz herself) depression and general mental health, as well as her rabid desire to hold on to the farm. We learn early on that Bobo was initially one of four, but has lost two siblings to unspecified causes. A brightly lit, slow motion flashback is thus imbued with a sense of dread due to the presence of both of the now-deceased. Its repetition throughout the film, advancing slightly each time, implies the circumstances were tragic. It's a strange focus; while the loss aids in understanding Nicola's constant self-medication, focusing on this event further dilutes the movie's themes and ideas. The same is true of Nicola's attempts to reclaim her youthful allure to the family's embarrassment, and a couple instances of personal violation which occur and are brought up once or twice again later for no purpose. Too significant to simply be color for the family, but too much in the background to carry much weight, spreading these dramatic subthreads across the family members means they don't sum up to much.

The closest thing to a saving grace the movie has is the humor that comes from the gleeful ignorance of Bobo. As with any child, she asks uncomfortable questions, spills secrets, and is generally an unknowing force of chaos in her family's lives. Her timing perfectly disrupts the adults, and it's her interjections which threaten to push the movie to make a stronger point. That threat never comes to pass, but it means that Venter's portrayal of the character skirts the line between important and annoying. Her performance is solid, especially given her age, and especially as she's fighting the cliched writing every step of the way.

At the end of the day, the story never pulls itself together. It fails to present the family as a a dynamic and engaging cast of characters, so it falls flat as a family drama. It's too skittish to make any comment more bold than "racism is bad" and "majority minority rule is destructive", or to effectively wield the backdrop of revolution to any real means. It's too dark and unpleasant to be purely entertaining, even as it has its moments. The result is a film divided, a tone that jerkily bumps all over the place, and a narrative mush matching the washed out color palette that overwhelms every shot.