The New York Times - September 21, 2005
Caryn James

Sub-Saharan Africa has come to dominate these political popcorn movies for practical reasons. The United States is not at war there. Considering the global powder keg and the war on terror, American audiences are likely to see Africa as unalarming (and to regard explosive northern African countries like Libya as part of the Middle East problem).

More important, Africa's devastating crises - AIDS, drought and famine - are humanitarian issues, easily reduced to pop-culture platitudes. It's the "Hotel Rwanda" syndrome, which morphed into the Live 8 phenomenon.

"Hotel Rwanda," from last year, is tough and eloquent, yet clings to the safe movie formula as it looks back at the Rwandan genocide more than a decade ago. Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), the heroic hotel manager who helps save hundreds of lives, has a touchingly romantic marriage. And the film is shaped as an uplifting survival story, complete with a last-minute rescue. Viewers are prodded to feel saddened by the loss, guilty about the lack of American intervention and, above all, soothingly enlightened that today they know better.

More recently, the underrated HBO film "Sometimes in April" also looked back at the Rwandan genocide, with Idris Elba as a man devastated by the loss of his wife and children. The film's torture scenes are even harder to watch than those in "Hotel Rwanda," and its romance is more tentative. The hero tries to rebuild his life with another woman but may be too caught in the horrors of the past. Without the need to attract a theater audience, HBO films are freer to toy with the formula.

But they don't always. The preachy "Girl in the Cafe" was first shown on HBO just before the July G-8 summit, the meeting of world leaders that inspired the Live 8 concerts lobbying politicians to do more to help Africa. The film's high-profile writer, Richard Curtis ("Love Actually"), has acknowledged in interviews that it's an activist movie, but the message is cloaked in an outlandish romance between Lawrence (Bill Nighy), a shy British diplomat heading to a G-8 conference in Iceland, and Gina (Kelly Macdonald), a young woman he hardly knows. Throwing security checks to the wind, he invites her along to Reykjavik, where at cocktail parties and dinners she lectures heads of state (and us) about their responsibilities to starving African children.

"The Girl in the Cafe" is big-hearted and soft-headed, much like Live 8 itself. What pop star would say no to ending African poverty? How many, with the famous exception of Bono, know a thing about African economies?

In this formula-bound context, "Lord of War," which opened last week, is an especially intriguing failure. Its message is simplistic: gun-running is bad. But the film dares to violate the first rule of mainstream movies - make the hero heroic - and nearly pulls it off. The character Mr. Cage plays, Yuri Orlov, is an unrepentant arms dealer, and we see the results of his work as a bullet makes its way from a Russian factory to the forehead of an African child. We can't like this character; he's responsible for the deaths of children.

But Yuri is also our wryly entertaining guide, introducing himself to us by facing the camera, talking in friendly voice-over to the end. We become so attached to his point of view that we root for him to outwit the Interpol agent played by Ethan Hawke. The central character doesn't fight the bad guys here; he is the bad guy, as the film exposes evil from the inside out.

Much of "Lord of War" takes place in New York, Yuri's home, and we follow him as he travels the world and exploits family connections in Ukraine. But the most effective scenes are set in Africa, where, Yuri explains, there are great business opportunities (all those guerrillas and warlords). The movie's most dynamic villain is the fictional Liberian dictator, Andre Baptiste (Eamonn Walker), who casually shoots and kills a man before Yuri's eyes. And the AIDS crisis is addressed with unexpected, deft satire when Yuri refuses to have sex with two prostitutes Baptiste has sent as a gift; it's tempting, but too risky.

While the writer and director, Andrew Niccol, cleverly tweaks the formula, "Lord of War" fails for a more mundane reason: Yuri's voice-over is burdened with too much explanation: "550 million firearms in worldwide circulation" is never going to roll off the tongue, not even Nicolas Cage's.

"The Constant Gardener" simply follows the rules with unusual grace and sophistication; it's this kind of film that keeps the formula alive. The dashing hero, Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), is an English diplomat in Kenya whose political conscience is raised after the murder of his activist wife, Tessa (Rachel Weisz). She suspects that a pharmaceutical company, testing drugs on Africans, is killing some in the process. Like Gina in "The Girl in the Cafe," Tessa lectures diplomats at parties, but here it seems in character, evidence that "The Constant Gardener" is better at gilding its politics. Still, the drug company is such a broad, easy target that the film's central message has less bite than the images of the impoverished villages Tessa visits as she fights against AIDS and for women's rights.

More typically, the formula runs away with the subject. In "The Interpreter," the United Nations interpreter played by Ms. Kidman overhears a plan to assassinate her country's dictator, but that plot is overshadowed by the predictable attraction between her and the Secret Service agent played by Sean Penn. And while there's no need for viewers to grasp the resemblance between the fictional dictator, Edward Zuwanie, and Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe, somebody noticed. Just two weeks ago, Zimbabwe's acting minister of information called the movie a C.I.A. plot. He may be the only one to take this lame political-formula movie so seriously. In Hollywood, it's a very short step from sugar-coated politics to no politics at all.

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