‘The Bang Bang Club’: Movie review and trailer

Ryan Phillippe plays one of four young and fearless photographers covering horrific violence in South Africa

BY MIRIAM RINN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

Several months after Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990 to an ecstatic reception from most black South Africans, reports of horrific violence in the townships where blacks lived began to appear. A small-scale civil war had broken out between followers of ANC, Mandela’s party, and Inkatha, the party associated with Zulu migrant workers. The violence was extraordinarily savage: people were burned alive and hacked to pieces. Some suspected that the white apartheid government was encouraging the violence by providing Inkatha with guns and other weapons.

Most of the world learned of the horrors through pictures taken by a group of adventure-loving young white photographers working for South African newspapers or freelancing for wire services. Four of these young men — Greg Marinovich, Joao Silva, Kevin Carter, and Ken Oosterbroek — earned the nickname The Bang Bang Club for their eagerness to rush to wherever the latest shooting was taking place. Steven Silver’s powerful and thought-provoking narrative film, “The Bang Bang Club,” is based on a book written by two of the men, and it captures both the pulse-racing excitement of being young and fearless in a dangerous place and the aftereffects of seeing and recording appalling situations.

Writer/director Silver knows Africa. He was a student in Johannesburg during the events recounted in the film, and was one of the producers of the Canadian drama about the Rwandan genocide, “Shake Hands with the Devil.” The film opens with freelance photographer Marinovich (played by the baby-faced Ryan Phillippe), wandering into a migrant hostel filled with Zulu workers and grabbing a series of great shots. His daring earns him street cred with the three other photographers already covering the violence, and his pictures grab the attention — professional and romantic — of newspaper photo editor Robin Cromley (Malin Akerman).

The four men spend their days in the ramshackle townships photographing brutality and chaos, and their nights hanging out in Johannesburg nightclubs, drinking and dancing with glamorous women. Silver emphasizes the duality of life in South Africa at the time with these contrasting views. The club scene might as well be on a different planet, and it’s difficult to disagree with one young black photographer’s complaint that the four privileged men are exploiting the situation, making money off African misery while feeding the Western bias toward African savagery.

Phillippe plays Marinovich as an ambitious, determined man who, despite some qualms, believes that it’s his job to shoot whatever he sees, even if that’s a man on fire. He’s not a fireman, he’s a photographer. The character who seems more vulnerable to the moral quandaries of the job is Kevin Carter, played by Taylor Kitsch. Kitsch, who portrays the irresistible Tim Riggins in the television series “Friday Night Lights,” owns tough-guy vulnerability. Just like Tim, Kevin is a good-hearted schlimazel, the guy whose poor judgment and bad decisions brings the roof down on his head. Carter is a drug addict and always out of money. Becoming less and less responsible, he leaves South Africa and goes to Sudan to cover a famine. There he takes a Pulitzer Prize winning picture of a starving child being stalked by a vulture, and the inevitable questions about whether he did anything to help the child drive him to the edge. Or so the film implies.

Was Carter’s responsibility to take a brilliantly composed photograph or to carry a starving child to shelter? It’s not a simple question to answer. That one photograph brought the horrible truth about famine in Africa to millions of people and helped to mobilize rich Westerners to do something. Anyway, that was Carter’s job — he took photographs. Should he have skipped out on that to offer direct assistance? There must have been many other people who could have picked up the child, but how many could have taken that shot?

With its fabulous cinematography by Miroslaw Baszak, “The Bang Bang Club” poses the same conundrum. Does a film with handsome actors and beautiful images of terrible events glamorize misery, or does it introduce a little-known calamity to a wider audience?