There is so much hatred, war and poverty.. –Wake Up Everybody
The Heartland Film Festival gave me an opportunity to sample an eclectic selection of fine films, including “Drunktown’s Finest,” an examination of Native-American lives and stereotypes; “Amira and Sam,” which writer/director Sean Mullin accurately described as “a love story that doesn’t suck;” and “Siddharth,” the heart-wrenching story of a family’s desperate attempts to climb from poverty and the brutal results that evolve from those decisions. But the movie that resonated with me was “A Thousand Times Good Night,” a film about the commitment and sacrifice of those who risk their lives to shine a light on the evils in the world.
Writer/director Erik Poppe told his story in an “Orlando” like way, reversing the gender of his character in much the same way that Virginia Woolf did in her semi-autobiographical novel. Juliet Binoche, a photojournalist committed to documenting the realities and atrocities in “conflict” areas, such as Kabul, Afghanistan, and the Congo, plays Poppe’s inverted self. “Rebecca” leaves her husband (played by “Game Of Thrones” hunk Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and their two children to document the realities and brutalities of war. Her images are supposed to shock us, to make us “choke on (our) coffee,” as we read our morning paper.
In 1968, a graphic image in our morning paper shocked a nation: Photographer Eddie Adams captured the moment that South Vietnam’s National Chief of Police executed a bound Vietcong prisoner with a gunshot to the head. Four years later, in 1972, photographer Nick Ut showed us a naked and napalm-burned Kim Phuc, running from a rain of fire. (In 1982, I saw a film that was taken at the same time that Eddie Adams was clicking his shutter, and I am still sickened by the memory of the pulsing of blood from the hole blown into the prisoner’s head.)
In “A Thousand Times Good Night,” (which is also oddly listed in the film credits as “1,000 Times Good Night”) Rebecca survives a bombing while she was documenting young female suicide bombers in Kabul. When she comes home to rest and heal, her husband Marcus wants to know why she was there. She cannot fully explain her commitment to the dangers of documenting war, and Marcus cannot understand why she would be willing to leave two young daughters “to get the next shot.” She promises to give up conflict photography and tries to reengage with her family. When she takes her sullen and distant 12-year old Steph into a purportedly “safe” environment — a refugee camp in Kenya — a dangerous situation develops that shatters her truce with her family, and puts her back on the front lines of “anger.”
When Erik Poppe spoke to the audience after the screening of his movie, he was asked if — as Rebecca termed it — “anger” was still directing his purpose. He answered that it was, and does, is “a positive anger” that makes him want to wake us up to the fact that “the biggest war on our planet” is being waged in the Congo.
As Teddy Pendergrass sang in “Wake Up Everybody,” the Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes’ song, “The world won’t get no better/ If we just let it be…” Movies such as Poppes’ “A Thousand Times Good Night,” and the images that journalists send back from the killing grounds of the world should wake us up to what Poppe/Rebecca knows: There are no easy answers to the endings of war. But at the very least, we need to try, and Rebecca/Poppe needs to keep trying to wake us up.
We gotta change it yeah, just you and me.