A Dry White Season

Donald Sutherland is perfectly cast and quietly effective as a man who will not be turned aside, who does not wish misfortune upon himself or his family, but cannot ignore what has happened to the family of his friend. Read full review

First-rate agitprop about the ruthlessness of South African apartheid, directed by Euzhan Palcy (Sugar Cane Alley) and adapted from Andre Brink's novel by Palcy and Colin Welland. The relentless plot is effectively set up and expertly pursued, and Hugh Masekela makes some striking contributions to Dave Grusin's musical score. Read full review

A Dry White Season is a powerful movie. It is sometimes horrifying and hard to take, although there also is considerable ironic humor in the Clarence Darrow-like trial tactics of the lawyer. The cast, clearly dedicated to the project, is uniformly excellent, and there is no sense in the skillfully built, suspenseful flow of the story that this is Palcy's first major feature. [06 Oct 1989, p.3E]

A Dry White Season is political cinema so deeply felt it attains a moral grace. A bitter medicine, a painful reminder, it grieves for South Africa as it recounts the atrocities of apartheid. Yes, it is a story already told on a grander scale, but never with such fervor. Read full review

A wrenching picture about South Africa that makes no expedient compromises with feel-good entertainment values, A Dry White Season displays riveting performances and visceral style.

A heavy, effective dramatization of the effects of the Soweto Uprising of 1976 on a white South African teacher (Donald Sutherland) whose black gardener is murdered by police. This film is unblinking in its depiction of the most violent side of apartheid. Marlon Brando lightens the drama with a colorful cameo as the lawyer hired by Sutherland to combat the state. Read full review

This is filmmaking meant to engage the heart-and other visceral organs-more than the mind; its effects are simple, broad and directly put. Read full review

Here's a good, honorable, but not great anti-apartheid movie, the first directed by a black woman. A Dry White Season unravels when it opts for a wrap-up-the-loose-ends thriller finish, but there's no faulting the level of acting or the level of commitment in it. [17 Sept 1989, p.B4]

A Dry White Season, despite transcendent subject matter, is arousing natural moviegoer interest as Marlon Brando's first screen outing in nine years. To his and everyone else's credit, the actor's undiminished magnetism never overwhelms a no-frills drama inspired by the 1976 uprising in Soweto, South Africa. [20 Sept 1989, p.4D]

Dry White Season is no less predictable than its predecessors, but its frankness and sincerity matter more than its fundamental bluntness. Read full review

A Dry White Season hits with the force of its convictions, and it hits hard. But it could have been more. [06 Oct 1989, p.G5]

Thoughtful, if predictable, movie: set against the Soweto Uprising of 1976 (but shot in and around Harare, Zimbabwe), the picture proffers two families, one white and headed by schoolteacher Ben du Toit (Donald Sutherland), the other black and headed by Ben's gardener, Gordon Ngubene (Winston Ntshona). Both are devastated by apartheid, but to different degrees and for different reasons. [22 Sept 1989]

A thumpingly didactic script, but Palcy has crafted a watchable - if not particularly important, given its competition - one. Read full review

Palcy, in what amounts to the casting coup of the year, enlisted the reclusive Brando to make his brief but memorable cameo appearance--his first film role since 1980--for union scale. His performance alone is worth the price of admission to this earnest, somewhat predictable, but moving and significant film. Read full review

Like its predecessors, A Dry White Season is too reserved to effectively depict the hell of South Africa. Its most powerful moments occur in the courtroom, in jail cells and morgues filled with dead black children when its starched white protagonist is safely off-screen. [06 Oct 1989, p.6]

Sutherland's not particularly strong in his role of the man who knew too little -- he's handicapped by obvious dialogue like "I was so naive." Read full review

A tract, a dry rerun of Cry Freedom, with none of that film's visual sweep (whatever else its faults) and with nothing new to tell us. It's filled with obvious, earnest performances--Marlon Brando's ironic and subtle one is the only exception--and unresonant writing. Read full review

Marlon Brando is airily light and masterly as the veteran anti-apartheid barrister who takes the case even though he knows that he can't get anywhere with the rigged court. He saves the picture for the (short) time onscreen. But the director, Euzhan Palcy, seems lost; her work is heavy-handed, and the script (by Colin Welland and the director, from a novel by Andre Brink) is earnest and didactic.

Like Cry Freedom, it's still whites debating racial injustice: fine for a book published in Afrikaans a decade ago, but a poor premise for a message movie. Read full review