Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

Cry Freedom Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 23, 2020

Maybe it was the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or at least the scabrous comments from diehard musical theater fans aghast at what they perceived to be the disastrous film version of A Chorus Line , but it’s interesting to note that Sir Richard Attenborough, after having helmed that much maligned film version of the musical, returned in a way to some of the same issues he had dealt with in 1983’s multiple Academy Award winning epic biography Gandhi when he made Cry Freedom four years after Gandhi and two years after A Chorus Line. Much as was the case with Gandhi, Cry Freedom is culled from real life, and it has a potent subtext (and actually text) of a “native” population yearning to escape the yoke of interlopers who have assumed a supposedly superior position. Cry Freedom is a bit more of a so-called “two hander” than Gandhi was, with the interplay between South African activist Steven Biko (Denzel Washington, Academy Award nominated for this performance) and a white newspaper editor named Donald Woods (Kevin Kline) giving the story a somewhat dialectical quality. There are some interesting similarities between Cry Freedom and A Dry White Season, which came along a couple of years after this film, not just with regard to their depictions of “race relations”, but perhaps even more saliently with regard to how they show that even supposed free thinking liberals can stand to be prodded to become even more “woke” (in modern parlance).

Without minimizing in any way the struggle that Gandhi led in “colonial” India, the situation Attenborough depicts as occurring in South Africa in the 1970s is arguably much more viscerally disturbing that what is shown in Gandhi for a number of reasons. First of all, as discriminated against as Gandhi and his fellow native Indians no doubt were, Gandhi himself was obviously extremely well educated and rather patrician, something that perhaps ironically led to a certain “distance” in the film between the afflicted and their champion. The horrors, even ravages, of apartheid, however, are amply documented by Attenborough from the get go, with a montage of images underlying the opening credits that make the hardscrabble lives of the blacks of South Africa achingly obvious. No amount of education or any inherent patrician qualities could really ever overcome the squalor that Attenborough almost casually offers to the viewer in the film’s opening moments.

Those opening moments end up kind of shockingly tipping over into violence as the first of several “police state” incursions against black people is shown. Absolutely brutal beat downs are shown, as are some implied rapes and other horrifying behaviors, before either of the film’s two focal characters is introduced. Attenborough, along with scenarist John Briley (adapting two books by Donald Woods), deserve credit for giving the viewer the contextualized “big picture” first, but the film makes its first inroads into more personal territory by offering scenes showing Woods to be an open minded journalist who nonetheless still subscribes (perhaps unwittingly) to some of the almost genetic prejudices white people in South Africa exhibited. In fact, while he’s sympathetic to the goals of Steve Biko, he is also afraid that Biko’s zeal will simply be an equal and opposite (and equally bad) counterweight to the oppressive policies of the white South African government.

While the film offers absolutely gut wrenching content about how blacks were routinely treated during this despicable era, the film actually ends up being a bit of a muckraking investigative tale after Biko’s fate is sealed by one too many arrests at the hands of out of control “police” forces. This very aspect also tends to make it play in some ways like A Dry White Season, with a similar “awakening” on the part of a white person looking into the death of a black character where there’s obviously been some kind of official cover up. Attenborough closes the film with an absolutely devastating crawl of all of the black victims of police violence while in custody, and the completely ridiculous and flimsy “reasons” for those deaths that the official forces gave.

Much as he did with Gandhi, Attenborough provides the requisite amount of epic "sweep" here (even if some of it is decidedly disturbing, as in the calamitous riot that climaxes the film), while also getting really top notch performances out of a wide and varied cast. Kline is actually pretty tamped down throughout the film, but Washington is moving and heartfelt as Biko. Fans of Downton Abbey: The Complete Collection and/or The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel will enjoy the appearance of Penelope Wilton as Woods' wife Wendy, and Inspector Morse himself, John Thaw, is also on hand as a potentially duplicitous official.

Cry Freedom Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Cry Freedom is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Umbrella Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. My hunch is this is probably an older master, which actually turns out to have both pluses and minuses, at least when understood within the context of this being a Universal release. Unlike a lot of Universal's relatively "older" catalog material that initially made it to high definition, there doesn't appear to have been much if any digital scrubbing done to this master, and so there's a rather healthy, and in fact at times rather gritty looking, grain field in evidence throughout the presentation. On the other hand, there's also been no real restoration done here, as evidenced by things like fairly significant wobble during the credits and some minor but still detectable signs of age related wear and tear. Color timing looked just slightly off to me, frankly more so with regard to the first hour or 45 minutes or so, where things look skewed toward yellow, making some flesh tones look kind of jaundiced. Things warm up at least a bit further on into the story, and some of the primaries, especially blues, are quite vivid. Detail levels are very good to excellent throughout the presentation for the most part, but some material which can sometimes be part of opticals can look pretty ragged and ill defined. My score is 3.75.

Cry Freedom Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Cry Freedom features a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track that capably supports the sometimes noisy environments of some of the squalid ghettos, while also rendering the Academy Award nominated score with nice fidelity and a generally very warm sound. The film evidently had some 70mm exhibitions with 6 track sound, and I kind of wondered what a 5.1 rendering would have added to some of the crowd scenes and the musical elements, but what's here suffices perfectly well. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout, though some of the accents are a bit on the heavy side, and unfortunately this release does not have any optional subtitles (that I could find, anyway).

Cry Freedom Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Not only are there no supplements on this disc, this is actually menu-less, authored to boot directly to the film after the brief Umbrella Entertainment masthead. I wasn't able to restart the film after it had played once without ejecting it and reloading it.

Cry Freedom Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Those who had some passing qualms about how A Dry White Season depicted a white man's "awakening" (when any sane person probably would have been wide "awake" from the get go) may have the same general reaction to Cry Freedom, and the film arguably might have done better to have simply concentrated on Biko and his struggle. But there is a lot of riveting material here, brought to life by an able and commited cast. Ronnie Taylor's evocative cinematography is alternately gorgeous and harrowing, and the Oscar nominated score is rousing and emotional. Technical merits are generally solid, and Cry Freedom comes Recommended.