It’s 20 years since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded in South Africa, ending — and in other ways just beginning — a country’s most cathartic and story-rich period of reckoning with its violent history of racial segregation.
Anyone who was there at the time will remember the startling, sometimes sick-making, power of the testimonies and apologies that emerged through its broadcast hearings: It was an emotional rinse cycle that no film on the subject, least of all one made principally by outsiders, has fully managed to convey.
Following very much in the heavy footsteps of such well-meaning, miscast misfires as John Boorman’s “In My Country” and Tom Hooper’s “Red Dust,” Roland Joffé’s drab, vigourless “The Forgiven” at least gives the Commission’s heroic chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, his due by placing him front and center in its history — though it’s debatable whether Forest Whitaker’s glazed
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