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Adapting a play into a film isn’t easy, look at the bloated corpses of many Shakespearean films, which is both understandable and odd. The only reason that I think it’s odd is because you’re already dealing with something in a scripted format, but a play and a film are two very different beasts in execution. A play happens in real time before you, you’re in an intimate space watching the events unfold before you. There’s a specific energy to live theater that can’t be replicated when that material is taken from its intimate setting and blown to gigantic proportions on the big screen. The best filmed adaptations try to find a way to gain access to the spirit of the piece while making it work as a film. Boesman and Lena is mildly successful, but I can think of a few small choices that would have possibly made it work better.
The ingredients are all there for an emotionally visceral and engaging experiencing. The story fragments are heartbreaking and shed a personal light upon the black faces of apartheid that could possibly go ignored, those who once had and know lost it all. But throbbing beneath that is deep-dive into the psychic wounds of institutionalized racism and its lasting effects. Add in strong lead performances from Angela Bassett and Danny Glover, and you’ve got everything needed to make a gut-punch of a film.
Yet it never quit reaches those heights. The play is very wordy and more concerned with allegory than narrative propulsion or developing completely human characters. These aren’t bad things for a film to have, but too much and the film becomes a filmed play without the correct language of cinema. Passages of the characters saying their private monologues aloud instead of through voiceover proves distracting, making the film feel like the director took the cast and crew out into the wild and decided to do a play in an outdoor venue. Bassett and Glover are two actors who can exude the theatrical, sometimes going too big on screen, but here they have found perfect vehicles their intense acting styles. Bassett has long been one of my favorites to watch, and here she takes her character’s desperation, neediness, and white hot rage and slowly builds a bonfire that threatens to burn the reels of film it’s so intense. And Glover manages to tap into the latent tenderness buried beneath the battered pride and over-grown frustrations. Boesman and Lena may fall into a more generic “good” area of play-to-film adaptations, but as a vehicle for Glover and Bassett it cannot be beat.
