Letting the Words Speak

On a crisp night several weeks ago, at the premiere of “Cry, the Beloved Country,” Miramax Films head Harvey Weinstein, First Lady Hillary Clinton and South African President Nelson Mandela took turns discussing the meaning of Alan Paton’s 40-year-old anti-apartheid novel and the movie based on it.

Weinstein used the occasion to hammer away at Republican efforts to dismantle the welfare state. Clinton focused on the story’s spirit of reconciliation. And Mandela called the movie “a tribute to South Africa’s youth” that “evokes bittersweet memories in my generation.”

Fortunately, none of these people had a hand in adapting the book to the big screen. Director Darrell James Roodt (“Sarafina!”) and screenwriter Ronald Harwood (“The Dresser”) did, and they resisted the impulse to tackle the Big Issues.

Instead they let the story and characters do that for them.

“What you have to do is to bring the most fundamental storytelling instincts to bear,” Harwood says. “You want to keep asking, ‘What happens next?’ ”

The plot concerns a rural black minister, Stephen Kumalo (James Earl Jones), and his search for his brother, his sister and his son, all of whom have gone to Johannesburg and succumbed to big city temptations. The brother has become a rabble-rouser, the sister a prostitute, and the son a thief and a murderer. Ironically, the murderer’s victim turns out to be a white defender of blacks who is also the son of a racist neighbor of Kumalo’s, James Jarvis (Richard Harris).

At the heart of the story is Jarvis’ conversion from racism to an understanding of his complicity in the conditions that his son was fighting against and that contributed to his death.

No wonder potentates wax rhapsodic. But as a practical matter, the story contains more than a few of what Harwood describes as monstrous coincidences, notably a harrowing scene in which Kumalo and Jarvis run into each other and slowly realize what they have in common.

The filmmakers manage to put this over, in part because of the performances, in part because they wisely--but at some risk--decided to use the author’s biblical language, which gives the movie a parable-like quality.

“That was a big decision to keep that poetic dialogue,” Harwood says, “because people have a reaction against poetic style in movies.”

Unfortunately, not every great scene from the novel made it into the movie. There’s one, which was filmed, in which Kumalo angrily tries to break through the apathy of his son’s pregnant girlfriend by suggesting that he will put a roof over her head in exchange for sexual favors.

“I don’t know why these decisions are made,” Harwood says of such cuts, “but I trust them.”

He has, of course, no choice. A screenwriter is just as much at the mercy of filmmakers as the original author is.

It just so happens that in this case, they were both well served.