Mark Reviews Movies: WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 6, 2020

There is, appropriately, a lot of waiting in Waiting for the Barbarians. The movie, an adaptation of J.M. Coetzee's 1980 novel (with the screenplay written by the author himself), is a harsh and sometimes brutal dissection of colonialism that makes its central point relatively early, before delaying the inevitable, intensified results. In the process, the screenplay and director Ciro Guerra lose a sense of both narrative and thematic momentum.

The core conceit of the story, in which the definition of "barbarian" is presented as an entirely subjective concept, is admirable. So, too, are the performances, which are a bit more specific than the caricatures the actors must play for the story to make its point.

Take Mark Rylance's unnamed magistrate, who oversees the law of an unidentified empire at a military outpost in the desert in an unspecified country. The place is one of peace, with the abandoned soldiers' barracks being transformed into a usually unoccupied jail. People of assorted cultures—visitors and citizens of the empire, as well as some locals—live and work and thrive in this outpost that has turned into a town of sorts.

The magistrate would have it no other way. He has come to place to keep the peace, and with peace already the status quo, this man of the law simply wants to maintain it. When he dies, he hopes for nothing more than a paragraph in the history books—if even that. While he was alive and in this place, things were good, the people were well, and his presence was nothing more than in serving those goals.

Rylance's character is, at the start at least, nothing and a nobody—simply a man living his life with no great or even meager ambition but with a degree of kindness and sympathy that is overlooked in a place where such qualities seem to be norm. The local jail, for example, is currently occupied with two men suspected of stealing sheep, and he rightly reasons that the allegation is incorrect. He's more concerned with the well-being of the old man and his nephew, who has a strange wound that won't heal.

The magistrate's life, job, goals, and character are challenged with the arrival of Colonel Joll (Johnny Depp), an officer with the police, not the military, who has been charged with investigating the potential of "barbarians" attacking the empire's outposts throughout the area. The magistrate is quick to point out that these so-called barbarians are merely nomadic tribes in the region—moving to and fro, minding their own business, surviving in the wild. The colonel, though, has his orders. The accused sheep thieves are the first targets of his investigation and the first victims of Joll's torturous means of obtaining information.

Throughout all of this, which establishes an inherent contradiction (Joll looking for "barbarians," when he's right there—an outsider to these lands whose tendency toward violence is far from civilized) and begins the course of a mounting and long-deferred conflict, Rylance serves as a calm, soft-spoken oasis amidst the cruelty that unfolds. His character, undeniably, is a Christ-like figure in Coetzee's orchestration, whether he's washing the feet of a stray girl (played by Gana Bayarsikhan) from one of the nomadic tribes, who has arrived at the outpost after being blinded by Joll or one of his men, or he's enduring a long trek through the desert, where he's tempted to make a selfish request at the end of a seemingly selfless act. This is not even mentioning the interrogation, torture, and humiliation he endures for his views upon returning to the outpost.

In Rylance's performance, though, such overt allegorical machinations are simply superficial. There's real kindness in the magistrate, because the actor plays it with such matter-of-factness, and genuine weight in his later struggle to remain decent, even as the outpost sees new, more vicious management. To his own credit, Depp never plays Joll as an over-the-top villain, simply a man devoted to his sense of duty, and Robert Pattinson, who arrives near the beginning of the third act as one of the colonel's underlings, downplays his own character's disarmingly cruel nature with some well-timed, disconcerting chuckles.

As for the story, it sets up and holds on to one idea—that the real, violent interlopers are the empire's emissaries—only to hold back on the full, sinister consequences of this realization until the third act. The magistrate becomes increasingly helpless—first to Joll's interference, then to the nomadic girl's wants and needs, and finally to his home's transformation into a brutal nightmare of zealous dedication to the empire—but with a sense of repetition about the character, as well as the cruelty on display (Some of these sights, such as a row of prisoners tied together through their hands and mouths, are jarringly horrific).

We don't, then, have to wait for the point of Waiting for the Barbarians. We do, though, have to wait for anything of real, critical value to be made of that point.

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