Two new films exploring the baser side of the human animal benefit from the sight of young men crying.
In The Devil Came on Horseback, opening Friday at the Roxie, the tears flow from a former Marine, Brian Steidel, as he faces implacable evil in a part of the world that is off the map for most Americans. Steidel comes from a family so steeped in military tradition that his only choice was which branch of service. After putting in his four years, Steidel couldn't stomach an eternity of desk duty before ascending up the Marine Corps' command ladder. An Internet ad led him to enlist as an observer with African Union forces attempting to forestall a massacre of black civilians in the Darfur region of Western Sudan, abetted by the Arab-led Sudanese government.
As Steidel photographed the horror, the atrocity reports compiled by the observers disappeared up the African Union's own inscrutable chain of command. The ex-Marine was limited to shooting at the Arab militias, the merciless Janjaweed (literally, the Devil on Horseback), with his camera. Eventually, the strain of observing the unbearable, including the charred remains of whole families, drove Steidel to dump his story and a thousand graphic photos on the computer of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Kristof's columns, with the first photographs ever to grace the Times' op-ed page, put Darfur into the national conversation. President Bush called it genocide. But as this moving film, last year's Independent Spirit Award-winning documentary, proves, people talk and march, but only governments can act.
Steidel's e-mails from Darfur to his beloved sister, his childhood best friend, included the conviction that if the American people could see what he saw, troops would be quickly dispatched. Seidel later exclaims through his tears, "Boy, was I naive!"
Filmmakers Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern show us hauntingly beautiful aerial shots of Western Darfur. This gorgeously-lensed memoir lacks only the history to clarify why a 20-year-old civil war between the Arab North and the black South turned so vicious. The curious can Google the BBC's essay on Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, the possibly gay British military pasha who conquered Sudan for his king, and who is best remembered for his image on British WWI recruitment posters which read, "Your country needs you."
Tragic 'Dawn'
September Dawn begins with a pastoral vision of the American West. A wagon train from Arkansas is crossing Southern Utah, and the leader asks a man who resembles a Biblical prophet, Jacob Samuelson (Jon Voight), for permission to camp in the nearby meadow. A young woman from the wagon train, Emily Hudson (Tamara Hope), is attracted to Jacob's older son, Jonathan (Trent Ford), who obliges her by taming her family's wildest horse. Up to this point, this independently produced Western could have been sponsored by the Mormon Church, so seductive is its image of a remote land (until 1848 a part of Mexico) that Mormon leaders figured they'd never have to share with other European settlers.
Director Christopher Cain (with co-writer Carole Whang Schutter) gets a crack at that rare first-draft of history, a tragic chapter covered up by the Church and virtually ignored by historians: the murder of 120 men, women and children from a wagon train by Mormon assassins, aided by a local Native tribe. The basic facts of The Mountain Meadow Massacre (the date, September 11, 1857, with all its metaphorical baggage, is perhaps overemphasized in the film's trailer) are not in dispute. Mormon Church leaders issued a belated apology in 1999 for the slayings, but have stoutly denied that the event was orchestrated by Church co-founder (and Utah territorial governor) Brigham Young (Terrence Stamp). The official Church story is countered by the memories of surviving offspring — about 17 children under age eight were abducted by the killers and adopted by Mormon families.
Cain and Schutter concoct a faux star-crossed young lovers tale to personalize the mayhem. Ford has the daunting task of playing the "good" Mormon, the callow young man who desperately tries to avert the tragedy, and argues with a demonically possessed father (Voight) and confused brother, Micha (Taylor Handley), before witnessing the slaughter of innocents.
Those wishing a nuanced look at Mormon life including the plight of queer Mormons should seek out Tasha Oldham's The Smith Family, a searing portrait of a Mormon wife and mother of two boys, struggling to care for a husband dying of AIDS who has infected her (www.pbs.org/pov/pov2002/thesmithfamily), or the four-hour PBS documentary of Mormon history at www.pbs.org/mormons/view.