White Material

This is a pretty asinine **** usually reliable Huppert lets herself get put in a movie that is full of pretentious angst ridden idiocy. Huppert does well enough as an obsessive coffee plantation owner who insists on rounding up locals for labor (after everyone has fled) in spite of being smack in the midst of a murederous civil war, somewhere in a former French African colony. To her getting in the harvest trumps saving lives. Her poor evolutionary strategy is passed on to her son, in spades. I can't even get into this ridiculous character, but in the end he shaves off his hair and joins the rebels, and mercifully gets smoked to death. It's all mean to be a metaphor for self centered colonialism, but it's so full of silly white folk pursuing their own stupidity that it's a wonder that the French colonies weren't a bust after on year.

"You're insane," someone says to Isabel Huppert's character. Yes, but so is everyone else in this frustrating movie -- insanely menacing, insanely violent, or insanely clueless. I enjoyed the dusty atmospherics of the African setting, and the buildup of tension was well-done. But it's hard to take the lead character seriously when she's so blind about everything from the threatening politics of her situation to what's happening with her own son. Couldn't help but think of a missionary family of my acquaintance, whose teenage son perceptively worked out a plan to cope/escape from his boarding school, should things blow up in the part of Africa where they were stationed. By contrast with that kid, Huppert's character seems imperceptive to the point of stupidity.

If this is a true presentation of todays Africa, well then we will never see prosperity there. The majority of the black persons in the film are portrayed as monsters. A painful film to watch, and not in a good way.

Although the film exhibits visual mastery in capturing the brutality and destitution of an African nation in the midst of civil war, and makes excellent use of music and silence, these technical virtues are far overshadowed by its narrative failings. 'White Material' succeeds in shocking its audience with scenes of both graphic and implicit violence, but the narrative focus of the movie undermines the value of these scenes as vehicles for social enlightenment; 'White Material' is not at all about the social issues of Africa. These are tangential. Instead, it follows the story of a French white woman, Maria Vial, managing a failing coffee plantation against the advice of every single person in the goddamn film. There are plenty of African natives with much more poignant situations than said-stupid white woman, but they are only given cursory characterization, really only enough so that you recognize them when they die. The madness of Vial nicely parallels the madness in the world around her, but parallelism is also the film's biggest problem: the main character's insane course runs parallel to the backdrop of the civil war in a strangely detached manner, providing no insight into any of the themes at hand. Vial's story might have been compelling had it been set somewhere else, but her angst is relatively insignificant in the context of a third-world nation at war with itself. Ironically, 'White Material' is in the end nothing more than pointless, self-interested, white material, only of value to those who have somehow, through the course of their own moral development, remained completely ignorant of the African continent.

I really did not enjoy watching this movie. I was very disappointed, particularly since the critics had given it great reviews. I am sure part of the problem is mine: I am really not that knowledgeable about French colonial west Aftrican history. However, even so, I had an extremely hard time figuring out what was going on because there were so many flashbacks and flashforwards. Also, there were no sympathetic characters in the movie. Everyone was crazy: the protagonist was crazy trying to get one last coffee harvest while a brutal civil was was taking place, her son was mad, her husband was crazy, and of course, both sides of the civil war were crazy. I also had difficulty trying to keep track of the characters, as many seemed to look a alike, and there was no character development. I think this is just one of those movies that the critics adore, but the general audience finds incomprehensible.