TV REVIEWS : ‘One Man’s War’ Against Dictatorship

Midway through “One Man’s War,” tonight on HBO (8-9:30), the true-life hero, a Paraguayan dissident, remarks on the political irony of the United States supporting a dictatorship in South America while the American press freely rails against the same dictator.

The man, in fact, is at his wit’s end. He’s a doctor who runs a free clinic for Paraguayan peasants, and he’s become adept at using the U.S. press to criticize the human rights abuses of President Alfredo Stroessner. The brutalizing state exacts its revenge, terrorizes his family and tortures and murders his teen-age son. The father, in turn, wages a one-man war to bring his son’s torturers and Stroessner’s agents to justice in Paraguay’s courts.

Anthony Hopkins stars as the real-life Joel Filartiga, whose singular, dangerous quest in the face of impossible odds made international headlines in 1976 and ripped apart the fabric of his family. A daughter (the luminous Fernanda Torres) is kicked out of medical school just before graduation, and the doctor’s wife (Norma Aleandro, who starred in another South American drama of political horror, “The Official Story”) cracks under the pressure. Even the doctor’s lawyer (a strong performance by Ruben Blades) is disbarred.

If you watch the show, don’t miss the updated report on Filartiga that follows the concluding credit role. Filartiga, we learn, was vindicated in a U.S. federal trial brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Amnesty International; Stroessner was ousted in 1989 but, conclude the words on the screen: “The nightmare in Paraguay continues.”

There’s hardly a Latin American country whose contemporary history hasn’t been the subject of a dramatization tracking a regime’s corruption and abuse. Of course, there’s nothing daring about ridiculing a dictatorship, but “One Man’s War” works on a human scale because Hopkins’ idealism as the good man blinds him to the dangers of hubris . The ambiguity you feel derives from the father’s single-minded zeal, which arguably gets his son killed.

Director Sergio Toldeo (who co-wrote the script with Mike Carter) delivers a gray-and-black story.