In my Country

Samuel L. Jackson and Juliette Binoche star in In my Country, one more of the many African genocide based movies we've had these days. Directed by John Boorman, who gave us Deliverance in the 70s and Hope and Glory in the 80s, In my Country fails pretty much everything it tries and are only a couple of actors the ones that bring something watchable to the screen.

It's about Langston Whitfield (Jackson), a Washington Post journalist sent to South Africa to report on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, which were held against Africans (mostly white), who tortured and killed people during the genocide in 1993.
Langston meets Anna Malan (Binoche), a white African journalist covering the hearings for the local radio. This premise is pretty interesting, it could've been an amazing movie but I'm afraid is not.
Out of nowhere, Langston and Anna start this love story while working together investigating the tortures and killings. And I have to comment about this because that is an interracial relation is fine, but there are 3 or 4 jokes about it, which she makes herself, even to her own mother ("He likes his coffee white", was just painful), and while all this is happening, she goes back to her house every weekend to see her husband and 3 children, but there's no mention at all of problems in the marriage or anything, so the entire love story comes out just as stupid.

The hearings are also problematic for me, because Langston and Anna are in there and we get to listen to around 10 hearings, and out of nowhere, Anna starts crying as soon as the tortured or their families start talking about it, and she's the only one crying, and it was very exaggerated. I really didn't like Binoche's acting in these scenes. There's also a scene in which she laughs instead of cry, and it's another horribly acted scene.
And worse of all is that we only listen about the tortures, but we never see flashbacks of them or anything, which really made them less tragic, and just not emotional enough to justify all the crying Anna does, which is a lot.

Then we have Anna's family, who may or may not have participated in the genocide. Hints of this are throughout the entire movie, and even her father comes up at one point and gives a whole speech about what happened and trying to justify things, but there's nothing admitted, and then he's out of the movie, so his character is just pointless. In fact, the entire subfield with her family is just unneeded, and it disconnects you from the main story which should be the genocide hearings and the investigation.

There's another subplot going throughout the movie and is about Langston interviewing Colonel De Jager (played by Brendan Gleeson), one of the biggest torturers back in the day. Langston tries to get him to give up the names and actions of his superiors, and these scenes are the highlight of the movie as Gleeson and Jackson put some strong performances here.

Overall, the movie just didn't work for me, and I think it would've worked much better if it were filmed as a documentary instead of as a multicamera movie, and they should've have keep it about the hearings and showed the real terror of the genocide and the tortures, instead of putting us through that horrible love story.
Though this movie was made last year too, it's clear that it tries to be a great African genocide movie, and bank on the praise received by the truly should've been nominated masterpiece we had last year, but In my Country fails, and is no Hotel Rwanda.