‘Makala’ depicts back-breaking labor – ‘Hero’ sums up Elliott’s life
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Simplicity is the key to the somber beauty of “Makala,” a documentary depicting a Congolese charcoal-maker doing his utmost to raise his family under penurious conditions. French helmer-lenser Emmanuel Gras’ camera embraces the subject’s every move with such rapt intimacy and cinematic poetry it’s easy to forget this is not a fictional drama. Reportedly the first documentary selected by Cannes’ Critics Week sidebar, the film snatched the Grand Prize, which should open doors to a few select theaters, on top of its long fest legs.
The title of the documentary filmmaker’s third feature means “charcoal” in Swahili, one of four major local languages in Democratic Republic of the Congo. Over the course of the film, one will get to see where that charcoal comes from, how it’s made and eventually sold. But the process is not presented in an informative manner as a National Geographic program would. Instead, it’s evoked as a Herculean struggle, as in the stark cinematic opening when Kabwita Kasongo is seen felling a colossal tree. Gras makes it look like a task as heroic as battling a hydra. This is followed by a moment of downcast musing, as if primordial Nature is mourning the rape of a wood nymph.
Kasongo is a 28-year-old who lives in the town of Kolwezi in the southern province of Katanga. His ambitions are as basic as they are universal — to build a house for his wife Lydie and three daughters, surrounded by enough land to raise livestock and do some subsistence farming. The only livelihood he knows is making charcoal from chopped and slowly flamed firewood, a back-breaking task that Gras observes with hallowed silence, devoid of any superfluous effects or exposition.
By the time Kasongo stuffs the charcoal into giant sacks and loads them onto his bicycle to take to town, Gras’ cinematography enters the realm of the symbolic. Through a gray and ochre cloud of dust and smog, Kasongo pushes the bicycle uphill, a veritable embodiment of Sisyphus. The vehicle, keeling over under the weight, looks like the titular beast of burden in “The Turin Horse.”
Incidentally, Gras’ use of steadicam and even the plangent cello solos composed by Gasper Claus are akin to Bela’s Tarr’s style in his last film. On this almost wordless 30-mile walk, the camera gets so close it magnifies the pearls of sweat that glisten and dangle from the handsome man’s eyelashes. Only once do we get a wider perspective, when the lens is pulled back to reveal he is not alone but among a line of others pushing their charcoal-stacked bicycles.
Abstract
The abstract quality of these images is partly redressed by a humane scene when Kasongo makes a stopover at his sister-in-law’s house to bring a pair of new sandals for his daughter, Divine, who’s lodging there. He displays strenuous self-control in choosing to call on them after his little girl has gone to sleep, and refusing to spend the night — because he couldn’t bear to see her cry when he takes leave in the morning. That emotional strength contrasts warmly with an earlier scene, when he whines like a baby while Lydie extracts a splinter from his foot.
Although DRC is rich in natural resources like diamonds and coal, decades of war have led the populous central African country’s level of human development to be ranked 176 out of 187 nations. “Makala” consciously eschews hard facts or figures and avoids making any social commentary, but the barbecued rats that make it onto the family’s dinner plate speak volumes about the depleted food chain. Yet, even as Kasongois is confronted by hard-nosed people throughout the film, and his determination seems to waver toward the end of his trip, audiences will come away believing that he and his lot are not bereft of hope. Ultimately, the film proves its worth by betraying a minimum of condescension or intrusiveness.
In spite of a lean budget, craft contributions boast a distinct style that benefits from well-planned shoots and clean, chronological editing by Karen Benainous. Of particular note are night scenes lit with a soft flicker that transports the viewer to an evocative pre-electric milieu.
Sam Elliott is thinking about the old days. About when he was just starting out in Hollywood in the late 60s as a contract player for 20th Century Fox, getting paid $85 a week and paying $85 a month for a little bachelor apartment near the studio gate. About how William Holden once took him to get a French Dip sandwich to calm his nerves after he froze up in a scene. About working with Jimmy Stewart and Slim Pickens and Ben Johnson.
They’re stories he’s told before, and will tell again, but there’s something else going on behind that all-too-familiar baritone.
As Elliott goes down the list of the people who helped the Saturday matinee obsessed kid get his start in Hollywood there comes a pause after every name and a sentence that will be repeated often. “Who is now deceased,” the 72-year-old says matter-of-factly.
It’s not that it’s a surprise for a man whose career has spanned 50 years. But this moment is different.
Blame it on “The Hero.”
“All of these people in my past at that period of time are gone. And I really wish they were here — particularly right now,” Elliott says on a recent afternoon in a sunny booth at the art deco Hotel Shangri-La in Santa Monica. “There’s something about ‘The Hero’ that sums it all up for me. If I never worked again after this movie, I’d be good with it.”
“The Hero,” out in limited release Friday, is a film that was made, literally, for Elliott. He plays Lee Hayden, a past-his-prime Western icon, who’s not getting roles anymore (only voiceover work), is estranged from his adult daughter (Krysten Ritter) and spends his days smoking weed with a friend (Nick Offerman). Then he gets the call — he has cancer.
It’s the first time anyone has written an entire script for Elliott, who has attained icon status in his half century of work playing strong and silent Western types, and send-ups of those men, from Virgil Earp in “Tombstone” to “The Stranger” in “The Big Lebowski.” And he doesn’t expect that it’ll ever happen again. (Agencies)
“We basically took what we loved about Sam, the legacy that he has, and we made him less famous, less successful and more of a screw-up,” said the film’s director and co-writer Brett Haley, who first bonded with the actor when he cast him as the man to sweep Blythe Danner off her feet in the charming indie “I’ll See You in My Dreams.”
A lack of work is not something that Elliott has to contend with either. In fact, he’s busier than ever juggling the shooting schedule of the Netflix sitcom “The Ranch,” with films and press in between. He just wrapped on Bradley Cooper’s remake of “A Star Is Born” (he plays Cooper’s agent) and will soon be off to do another film in Massachusetts.
“I’ve never had a schedule like this one. It’s like the order went down, ‘Don’t give him a minute’s free time,’” he says with a self-deprecating smile. “I’m embarrassed about the riches.”
He suspects his wife, actress Katharine Ross, is a little worried about him.
Elliott and Ross have been married for 33 years, and living in Malibu since they met. They have dogs and cats and chickens and worry about the Santa Ana winds and every year wonder whether or not the fires will blow their way. He misses the time when they could ride horses up and down the beach.
“We’ve had a really wonderful life together,” says Elliott, who married Ross, turned 40, and had his first and only child Cleo in the same year. “It didn’t come early, but it came.”
It pains him to think about how different his second act in Hollywood has been from Ross’. She actually had a bigger part in “The Hero,” but it was mostly cut.
“It’s brutal on her, as you’d expect because she’s a woman … Hollywood’s tendency for casting the woman out when she’s past 10-years-old,” Elliott says grimly. “I think she thinks that she has no value anymore, on some level, in the business.”
You get the sense that Elliott, who often ends sentences with a deeply sincere and elongated “incredible,” is infinitely more interested in others than himself — the antithesis of most actors. He wants “The Hero” to succeed so that Haley can move on with his directing career. He thinks about his legacy not in terms of his career or body of work, but his family. And he’s quick to point out that he is not his characters.
“I’m not those guys up there. That’s not who I am. It’s what I do. So many people confuse that. They think that that’s me. That’s me playing the part. I’m not one of those chameleon type actors that changes his visage and sound every time,” he says. (Agencies)
By Maggie Lee
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