Beasts of No Nation

Image: Netflix

Idris Elba in 'Beasts of No Nation'

A long time ago, St. Augustine wrote that while we’re to love all men equally, it’s impossible for us as limited individuals to do equal good to everyone in the world. So, he wrote in On Christian Doctrine, “you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you.” If you can only afford to give away one coat this winter, he says, then give it to your neighbor before you give it to a stranger.

I get squirmy thinking about this completely common-sense exhortation, because the practical extension is that if you can only feed one hungry kid, feed the one in your town, not the starving kid in a slum halfway around the world. Why does that make me feel uncomfortable? And what do I do with that?

I have an answer to the first question, which is that today I can sit in front of my TV and be brought by an “accident of circumstance” into at least feeling a closer connection with the kid halfway around the world. That is what film and television does for us, and it’s what makes the time we’re living in unlike any other. In his 1989 book The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey called this phenomenon “time-space compression.” Our natural relationship to physical things we experience, like space and time, have been altered today, he says—mostly by our technologies.

Other theorists have taken this idea and said that it’s actually an essential facet of contemporary life, what makes living today different from living at any other time in human history. Media, telephones, fast travel, globalization—all these things mean that the world has gotten if not literally smaller, then phenomenologically smaller: that is, it just feels like everything in the world is happening in my living room. A revolution happens in Iran and I can watch it on my computer screen in a browser, right next to the baseball game happening on the other coast. I hear about a natural disaster in a country I can barely find on a map and donate $25 by texting a number on my phone. Then I go text family members who are just across the house to come to dinner.

A movie—facilitated by more modern technologies—puts me in close contact for a few hours with someone else’s life: in a good movie, the images, sounds, and characters feel incredibly real. So for instance, in a movie like the brutal, searing, nearly incomprehensible Beasts of No Nation, I feel as if I am living alongside Agu for a while.

Agu (played by stellar newcomer Abraham Attah) is a child soldier in an unspecified African country—we’ll get to that in a bit. But Agu wasn’t always a child soldier. He was a the happy youngest boy in a Christian family, relatively well off in comparison to their neighbors, who gave away some of their land to refugees. He gets into scrapes with his friends. They know there’s a civil war going on, but for the most part, they’re just being kids.

Then the village discovers that the government forces are headed their way to take their town, and they send away the women and children. Agu is still a child, but he has to stay with the men. When the soldiers kill the men, he runs into the bush, where he meets with rebel forces led by their charismatic Commandant (Idris Elba). Agu is trained to join the rebel forces and from there, he sees the horrors of war—and so do we, of course, all the way to a place that seems a whole lot like hell. Whether or not salvation can come—and whether it will feel like salvation—makes the movie riveting, but very hard.

Image: Netflix

Abraham Attah and Idris Elba in 'Beasts of No Nation'

The film was directed, written, and lushly shot by Cary Jo Fukunaga, whose more recent work includes the first season of True Detective and an excellent Jane Eyre adaptation. It’s a worthy project and for the most part, it works as a film, too. The story works on a lot of levels, including a Richard III-style meditation on the downfalls of ambition run amok. Agu, his family, his comrades, and his Commandant are all part of a world that feels very real, and the extent of the horror dawns slowly on us—mostly because our experience with boy soldiers is largely second-hand, through books like A Long Way Gone and documentaries by groups like Invisible Children.

So this dramatization will twists your insides, no doubt about it. But, I debate the merits of the choice to keep the setting nonspecific. On the one hand, unfortunately, all African countries are just some vague “Africa” to a lot of Westerners, so it might not matter all that much. And doubtless Agu’s experiences are a composite of vast numbers of stories of boys who really have been through this war.

On the other hand, a film like this isn’t meant to entertain. It's actually meant to do what Augustine suggests—it’s meant to take what is still pretty abstract in my mind and bring it close to me so that I can pay special regard. Before I saw the film, I knew that boy soldiers were out there. I had read books and listened to talks and read newspapers articles, but I hadn’t personally encountered anyone who’d had that experience, on whom I could put a face and name.

I know this partly because it was produced by Participant Media, who seem like they're everywhere this year, with films like He Named Me Malala and Spotlight. Participant Media is “dedicated to entertainment that inspires and compels social change,” and they want that with this film. Furthermore, it’s being distributed by Netflix—the first such major feature film to do this, though it will get a little play in theaters to qualify it for awards season—and this is significant, because instead of just hitting the major metropolitan areas and then going to VOD eventually, it will arrive all at once this weekend in the over forty million homes American homes that have a Netflix subscription.

Now, when I hear about boy soldiers, I will always see Agu in my mind’s eye. So will a lot of other people. And that, I think, is good. It encourages me to care—at the very least, it encourages me to pray and to understand that if I ever can do something, I should.

But I feel the nonspecific setting may work against this. It takes a fictional story and makes it a bit more fictional-feeling—almost as if the words “long ago and far away” were flashed on title cards at the beginning. The movie is called Beasts of No Nation, and surely this was on purpose—but as a storytelling choice, I’m not sure it was the wisest.

To answer my second question above: what do I do with the discomfort I feel after I see this? What a tough question in a world where I can see Beasts, Malala, and Spotlight inside of a week. I can feel outrage, compassion, empathy, and the need to take action all at once for boy soldiers and girls denied an education and historic abuse scandals enabled by secretive authoritarian religious leaders—not to mention, for instance, racism and poverty and homelessness and cruelty in my own city. No wonder we’re experiencing compassion fatigue. (Ken Morefield wrote about this for us earlier this fall.)

Image: Netflix

Abraham Attah in 'Beasts of No Nation'

This is a question I can’t answer. I’m not sure exactly what St. Augustine would say. He didn’t live in a globalized world, and he didn’t have movies and Twitter and social media action campaigns and Netflix.

What I do know is that I can’t do it all, and that in trying to, I may lose my capacity to care. I guess all I know is a small thing I must do: to try to love my neighbor as best I can. To wake up each morning, trying to figure out who my neighbor is today. To hug my nieces and nephews and think of the little kids who don’t get to grow up like them and to wonder why, and be content without an answer, yet. To love, and pray.

Caveat Spectator

Beasts of No Nation is not rated, but if it was, it would be a “hard” R for violence, language, and thematic material. There is a lot of violence in this movie, obviously, but some of it is quite brutal and graphic, including a guy getting his head sliced like a melon with a machete, people getting shot (including execution-style) and brutally beaten and kicked; I think the depiction is probably merited, for the most part, but I had to look away sometimes. (I imagine it’s not much different than your average Game of Throne or Walking Dead episode in that respect.) There’s a lot of swearing and obscenity, and a lot of it is in English. The Commandant gives a pep talk to the men about the women in a town they’re going to that includes some crude euphemisms for male genitalia. When they actually get to the town, they end up at a brothel, and there is no on-screen sex but we know what’s happening. There is also the strong implication that the Commandant is sexually abusing some of the youngest boys, though the actual act is kept off-camera. Everyone is on drugs (mostly things they snort), including the boys. One member of the rebels wears only a rope around his pelvis for clothing and a few times we can see him fully nude as they go to war. Christian prayers and devotion are present throughout—Agu prays, but eventually stops—but they are mixed with some non-Christian religious practices, particularly among the rebels in a scene of initiation.

Alissa Wilkinson is Christianity Today’s chief film critic and an assistant professor of English and humanities at The King’s College in New York City. She is co-author, with Robert Joustra, of How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics at the End of the World (Eerdmans, May 2016). She tweets @alissamarie.