Troublemaker
(South Africa/USA/UK, 94 min.)
Dir. Antoine Fuqua
Prod. Antoine Fuqua, Mac Maharaj, Arthur Landon, Kevin Mann, Mark Bauch, Markus Davies
Programme: Premieres (World premiere)
In 1918 a young boy was born to one of four wives of a local chief in the Kingdom of Thembuland, situated in what is now commonly known as South Africa. The child was named Rolihlahla, the Xhosa word for “pulling the branch of a tree.” The term has a colloquial meaning of “troublemaker,” which gave that young boy a mission for the rest of his life. For, as another civil rights leader, John Lewis, used to argue, there’s such thing as “good trouble.” Sometimes branches have to be pulled to bring more light into the world.
Eventually named Nelson by those at the Methodist school he attended, he would eventually make his way to law school. That phase of his journey would begin the long process throughout his adulthood advocating for his people in an attempt to overthrow the insidious Apartheid system that constrained black Africans as underclass citizens. Eventually, his activism turned to social unrest and political violence, and he was arrested for treason in 1956. After years at Robben Island Prison, he would be released and eventually elected leader of the same country that held him in solitary confinement for years.
Seeing Nelson Mandela’s story spelled out as a series of events they are above is remarkable on face value. However, but what’s often lost along the way is the man himself. Beyond the iconography of his round and warm face, Mandela was a fierce political activist who spent decades in service of what for many felt like a futile pursuit. What makes his story so remarkable is that if it hadn’t actually happened, few would believe it possible.
Antoine Fuqua, celebrated for dramas like Training Day, has directed and produced numerous documentaries, including the Emmy winning Legacy: The True Story of the L.A. Lakers, and 2019’s What’s My Name about Muhammad Ali. His latest doc is an unabashed celebration of Mandela’s rise from the fields of his ancestral lands to the top of the political ladder, using for the most part the man’s own voice to tell this remarkable tale.
Mandela gave innumerable interviews, of course, allowing Fuqua and his team to assemble what feels like first-person recounting of everything from his childhood change of name, through to his early marriage, his education, his activism, right through to his incarceration and eventual release. These reminiscences are buttressed by many other witnesses of this journey, including a fellow prisoner from Robben and who helped smuggle out Mandela’s transcript for Long Walk to Freedom, the memoir that would further build his stature as a freedom fighter.
Through the use of charcoal-like animation mixed with archive news footage and rare photographs, the film provides a general sense of Mandela and his struggles, from the personal sacrifices he made through to his strident demands for fairness for all South Africans.
What Troublemaker not do is deeply interrogate the results of Mandela’s political ascendancy, nor does it tackle the thornier issues of decolonialization, as well as the rampant corruption that continued long after the power transitioned to the Black majority, which resulted in an increasing diminution of the African National Congress’s standing to this day. Similarly, some of the more complex relationships in Mandela’s life, especially with Winnie who later dismissed many of his accomplishments and derided him as a figurehead who let his people down. Just as Mandela was able to stomach being imprisoned for all that time, surely his legacy can withstand a more objective portrayal.
While Fuqua’s film is laudable for allowing many individuals to provide witness, there’s still a sense of superficiality that burdens the work. Troublemaker feels like the start of a reconciliation between the myth and the man, and while this film refuses to burden itself with some complicated questions invited by an extraordinary figure, the lasting legacy of Mandela will be that generation upon generation will continue to mine his life for inspiration.
