Yet "Cry Freedom" is a sincere and valuable movie, and despite my fundamental reservations about it, I think it probably should be seen. Although everybody has heard about apartheid and South Africa remains a favorite subject of campus protest, few people have an accurate mental picture of what the country actually looks and feels like. It is an issue, not a place, and "Cry Freedom" helps to visualize it. The movie was mostly shot across the border in Zimbabwe, the former nation of Southern Rhodesia, which serves as an adequate stand-in. We see the manicured lawns of the whites, who seem to live in country club suburbs, and the jerry-built "townships" of the blacks, and we sense the institutional racism of a system where black maids call their employers "master" and even white liberals accept that without a blink.
The film begins with the stories of Donald Woods, editor of the East London (South Africa) Daily Dispatch, and Steve Biko, a young black leader who has founded a school and a clinic for his people and continues to hold out hope that blacks and whites can work together to change South Africa. In the more naive days of the 1960s and 1970s, his politics are seen as "black supremecy," and Woods writes sanctimonious editorials describing Biko as a black racist. Through an emissary, Biko arranges to meet Woods. Eventually the two men become friends, and Woods sees black life in South Africa at first hand, something few white South Africans have done. (Although how many white Chicagoans, for that matter, know their way around the South Side?)
Although Biko is played with quiet power by Denzel Washington, he is seen primarily through the eyes of Woods (Kevin Kline). There aren't many scenes in which we see Biko without Woods, and fewer still in which his friendship with Woods isn't the underlying subject of the scene. No real attempt is made to show daily life in Biko's world, although we move into the Woods home, meet his wife, children, maid and dog, and share his daily routine, there is no similar attempt to portray Biko's daily reality.
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