The subject of an extensive profile in Vanity Fair, Sam Childers is a reformed felon from Pennsylvania who simply turned his aggression in a different direction: hunting down Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, said to be responsible for tens of thousands of child abductions in northern Uganda and southern Sudan. As Childers himself put it. “In 1992, I found God, in 1998 I found Satan.” Childers has his own church, an orphanage in Nimule, a biography, Another Man’s War and now a movie based on his life, Machine Gun Preacher. He even gets to be played by Gerard Butler, the man who once said: “This is Sparta”, but whose stock from 300 has gone down to single digits.
In a sense, my review of the film, expressing scepticism about Childers’ humanitarian intent – instead he embodies the worst aspects of interventionist American foreign policy – has already been written in the responses to the Vanity Fair profile. It is worth adding that the film is not just rich in self-aggrandisement but high on corn. Not only does Childers, according to the movie, kick drugs and larceny. He and his family survive a tornado. He helps rebuild his community, starting his own construction business and then takes a trip to Uganda with his church, which points him towards Kony. An aid worker describes Childers as a mercenary, but Forster, Butler (who served as co-producer) and screenwriter Jason Keller down play the trips out to find their man. Childers saves kids; we are supposed to admire him for that.
As the drama progresses, Childers faces a tough choice: does he continue his Kony hunt or does he ensure his family have the trappings of a good life, including a limousine to a party? The answer is obvious: Childers feeds his own addiction. He even saves the aid worker who was critical of him. He may let his friend Donnie (Michael Shannon) down, but Donnie, who went back to drugs, did it to himself.
The representation of Africa here is extremely negative. Childers is presented as a modern-day Rambo. A younger Sylvester Stallone had the off-screen persona to embody the part, although he might struggle to be understood during the preaching scenes.
Overall, the film feels like Republican propaganda masquerading as an inspirational tale of redemption. I felt dirty watching it In any case, it is too soon for a film to be made about Childers, unless it is seen as another means of fund raising for the man. By returning fire that he provokes, Childers continues to kill people without any proper mandate. Should not the United Nations take action?
Do traumatic incidents in childhood automatically turn people into sociopaths? I remain to be convinced. People make bad choices when they voluntarily disassociate themselves from those closest to them and seek answers elsewhere, but they can still evaluate moral choices.
That is my perception of Kevin (Ezra Miller, excelling at callow self-regard), the titular problem child in director Lynne Ramsey’s first American set film, We Need To Talk About Kevin, adapted by Ramsey and her husband Rory Stewart Kinnear from Lionel Shriver’s best-selling novel. Kevin has a caring father, Franklin (John C Reilly), a smart and successful mum, Eva (Tilda Swinton) and an adorable moppet of a sister. Yet he commits a Columbine-style massacre at his school, the details of which are drip-fed to us throughout the movie. Key props are a bow and arrow and a sets of chain locks. The real moral for parents appears to be: don’t let your kid use your credit card. Oh, and make sure he outgrows Robin Hood; the Russell Crowe film ought to do it.
The film is told, like the book, post-massacre. Eva faces the parents of kids whose lives her son took with a crushing sense of shame. Her front door is daubed with red paint, viewed with detached disapproval by her neighbour. Eva is made to feel the criminal, inheriting her offspring’s crime. Indeed, the visceral power of the novel is based around the guilt and nausea it inspires in parents for somehow failing their kids. Eva takes a low-paid job and tries to carry on. She bears her punishment, knowing her son, in a juvenile detention centre, has not really faced the consequences of his action.
I suspect all this resonates with some parents because, in spite of best endeavours, they cannot maintain a positive influence on their children. By boiling it down to issues of upbringing, Ramsey’s film is a cheat. Where are the scenes of peer pressure? Are sociopathic tendencies partly unchecked owing to the impossibility of colleges in monitoring students’ behaviour? With the recent riots involving children led by peer pressure rather than their parents, the film has an immediate resonance. The film, like the book, offers a debating point on a hot topic, although I wouldn’t call it entertainment, or indeed the definitive view of the subject.
