Idris Elba and Abraham Attah in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s 'Beasts of No Nation'
There are many issues where the collective will of society has, for one reason or another, failed. Whether it be a selfishness that perpetuates poverty, or the need to argue in the face of science and math when it comes to climate change, most of the problems facing the world today aren't quite as intractable as believed. Usually there are solutions to attempt and choices to be taken, but we don't because as a culture we decide it would be too damn hard and devolve into a "Fuck 'em, I got mine" mentality. Someone might have to pay more in taxes, or someone might not be able to drive as big of an SUV, or someone might have to pull themselves away from their Facebook page or Twitter app and actually give a damn. And this also applies to those issues that we somehow come to believe are a thing of the past, or because it's mostly on the other side of the Earth we pass it off as someone else's problem.
For example, there are more slaves on this planet today than there have been at any other point in history. Across the world, including right here in the United States, there are more than 30 million people living in bondage. And that statistic does not come from a redefinition of what the word slavery means. It counts all the ways human beings are controlled as property to do the labor and tasks of someone else. One of those ways is the use of children as cannon fodder. According to the United Nations, there are hundreds of thousands of children out there somewhere being forced to carry a Kalashnikov in some asshole's child army. There's a reason this is not only counted as slavery but one of the most reprehensible war crimes one could perpetuate, since the purveyors are not only destroying the children's lives but also forcing people to defend themselves by killing kids. This is the choice our own forces, as well as those in the region, have to confront in dealing with ISIS, Mexican drug cartels, or Boko Haram, which have all kidnapped children and forced them into service.
Based on the novel of the same name by Nigerian-American author Uzodinma Iweala, Netflix's Beasts of No Nation is the passion project of director Cary Joji Fukunaga, who also produced and adapted the story for film. The story follows a young boy, Agu (Abraham Attah), from an unnamed West African country as he is torn away from his family and indoctrinated into being a soldier in a rebel army led by the Fagin-like Commandant (Idris Elba). The larger political conflict and who represents which ideological side is left for the viewer to figure out, with the main focus being the mental process and cruelty that can force a child to kill.
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Frederick Douglass once wrote that "it is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men." But it is in that same malleability of a young psyche, which can be made strong through good parenting, that broken men can take advantage of and manipulate innocence into something more menacing. Broken men have a way of breaking children and creating more broken people.
The daily life of Agu seems a happy one in the beginning, even as there are signs of trouble on the horizon. He and his friends play in their village. He pranks his brother. And his family is a loving one. But there are foreign peacekeepers on the streets, with reports that a civil war is worsening and advancing towards their home. There is no school anymore, Agu's mother and baby sister are sent away to the capital, and soon thereafter one of the factions invades and resorts to summary executions.
When we first meet the Commandant, Agu has been captured after witnessing the murder of his father and brother, and he's living alone, hungry and afraid, in the forest. Instead of killing Agu, the Commandant sees a fresh recruit to be exploited. "A boy is a dangerous thing," the Commandant says, with his child army being held together through drugs, food, and the longing for structure, companionship, and affiliation. But his surrogate parenting provides these things in the most harmful way possible. Elba's Commandant is both a swaggering figure that can use him charm to manipulate and abuse, and a pathetic predator who answers to bigger monsters than himself.
Above all, this is a film where we watch a 12-year-old boy's systematic transformation into a killer of men, but we never lose sight that he, and the others around him, are children. And even though this is Abraham Attah's first role, with Attah winning the best newcomer’s award at the Venice Film Festival for his work in Beasts of No Nation, his performance of a stoic Agu speaks volumes through frustrated looks and meaningful glances. Where Iweala’s source novel uses Agu's made-up English of present participle verbs and inconsistently dropped articles to get across the thoughts of an African child under the pressure of a horrible situation, it's Attah's plaintive looks, even at Agu's worst moments, that build sympathy in the audience and convey his inner thoughts.
Fukunaga turned heads with his 2009 debut
Sin Nombre, received critical accolades for his 2011 version of
Jane Eyre, but is probably best known for directing the entire first season of HBO’s
True Detective, which had visually distinctive flourishes. Here Fukunaga attempts the same through dropping out the sound during atrocities and including surreal visual sequences set to a synth score when Agu and his fellow child soldiers are tasked with fighting and killing while high on "brown-brown" (i.e., heroin) or cocaine cut with gunpowder to create an intense and disturbing mood.
If Beasts of No Nation has problems, it's in the second half. The movie goes on a bit too long and loses momentum towards the end. The choice to not fill in details about the larger conflict within the story is a deliberate one, since the story is from the perspective of a child that doesn't understand or know those details either. In that way, it places the audience in the point of view of Agu. It's that vagueness that keeps it from just being an "issue movie" and gives it a universality, but can also in some ways be frustrating. But Attah and Elba's performances are definitely the reasons to give the movie a chance.
- The non-actor: Striving for authenticity and wanting someone who looked and sounded like a child from the region, the film's casting team sought out non-actors, auditioning about 1,000 boys before finding Abraham Attah.
- The film was shot in Ghana: Fukunaga was promised cooperation from the Ghanaian military, but their support was reportedly less than optimal during the production. Also, after the U.S. beat Ghana during the 2014 World Cup finals, none of the production's drivers or hotel staff showed up to work the next day.
- Idris Elba almost fell off a cliff: According to an interview in Variety, Elba leaned against a tree next to a waterfall, lost his footing and fell over the ledge. The actor grabbed a branch on a narrow ridge to avert a 90 foot drop down the side.
- First movie in Netflix's push to shorten the theater to home window: Beasts of No Nation was released in a limited theater release and to Netflix streaming on the same day. Theater owners have been strongly opposed to any moves that would shorten or do away with a 90-day window between a movie’s theatrical release and availability in homes. Netflix is now doing theatrical releases, arguing that smaller movies and more art house fare should be made available sooner to enable more distribution opportunities. Netflix executives are also on record as saying that theatrical revenue doesn't matter in their business model. So, even though Beasts of No Nation made only around $50,000 in a limited release this weekend, if it brings viewers to the streaming service, and critical recognition and possibly Oscars down the line.
Fukunaga ... got a call saying that Netflix wanted to buy the film. "I'm gonna be brutally honest," the director says. "My heart sunk a little bit because I thought, 'Does no one want to buy this film, and put it in theaters?" And then [Netflix Head of Content Acquisition] Ted Sarandos got on the line and he's like, “No, no...we want to put this movie in theaters [as well], we want to move into new territory.' [The company is partnering with Bleeker Street Media for its theatrical run.] So people will have the chance to see it on a big screen, and the company doesn't have to worry about box-office returns because they have a platform that could potentially get this out to something like 65 million viewers. I'm not saying that many people will watch it, but for a movie like this to have that opportunity..."
Elba, who'd signed on as a producer for the film as well, echoes his director's thoughts: "There was a part of me that was always like, 'Who's going to see this film?' Now the answer is, potentially millions of people, all of whom are getting a little education about what's going on in the world. So, you know, the Netflix model...thank fuck for that!"