Message movies are always problematic. The earnestness and devotion to the cause of the filmmaker more often than not overrides the basic tenet of cinema: to entertain the audience.
This attempt by Boorman to portray the evils of South Africa's apartheid system is somewhat successful thanks to its two stars, but in trying to cover as much ground as possible, it ultimately fails.
Binoche is a poet-turned-reporter based on Antjie Krog, hired by South Africa's public radio to cover the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, a series of public forums that took place after the fall of apartheid in 1990. They sought to heal the racial wounds caused by the previous 42 years of oppression and torture. At the first hearing, she meets Langston Whitfield, a reporter insistent on forcing the history of apartheid into his own views of American race relations.
As is the case with these sorts of movies, neither is a real person but symbols whose purpose is to espouse various facets and opinions. Most of the attention is on Binoche's Anna Malan, a naïve Afrikaaner who stands for all the whites who did not directly take part in apartheid but still did nothing to stop it. As she attends the meetings and hears the testimony from victims and survivors, she finds her innocence stripped away. Whitfield's role is to keep the ball rolling on Malan's character development while at the same time serving to put forward the simplistic view that South Africans were able to put their horrific past to rest through ubuntu—a humanist approach that seeks understanding rather than punishment, granting immunity to torturers and killers if they can show contrition and demonstrate they were only following orders. (Ignored is the violence between rival ANC and Inkatha Freedom parties, for instance.)
Standing out in a minor role is Brendan Gleeson as De Jager, some sort of colonel who oversaw a torture compound and is Whitfield's exclusive interview subject. As the only character representing all of apartheid's brutality, he's considerably underused and the film would have benefited from simply concentrating more on him. This, however, would have meant Boorman would have had to drop the graphic commission testimonies, the parts of Krog's book, Country of My Skull, that obviously captured the director's heart. But it also would have meant a movie that would have been far more entertaining, and thereby more successful in getting Boorman's message out.