Guys, I may have been wrong about District 9. Not in my prediction that the movie had a chance to be remarkable, which I believe it is. The movie's palette, shooting Africa in grays and browns, rather than the gaudy-but-gorgeous colors that show up in movies that spend time in African slums, like The Constant Gardener, and Lord of War (man, I should do a post on that movie's underdiscussed virtues someday), did a wonderful job of reinforcing the movie's grimness. There are a ton of marvelous little details in the movie, the cadance of protestors' strides, for example, looks right out of the documentaries I watched in my South African history classes. The engagement with beliefs in witchcraft and spiritualism and healing may have come in a discomfiting package (Spencer Ackerman and Matt Zeitlin's conversation about the portrayals of Nigerians in the movie is well worth reading) but it's not necessarily totally out of line with some African beliefs, and even if we're not comfortable with it doesn't mean it's an issue that shouldn't be engaged with. The metaphors for apartheid (including for South Africa's biological weapons research) were nicely balanced.
But
MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT
the area in which District 9 got to me was one that I didn't remotely expect: the movie contains the most touching and earned romance I've seen in a movie in what feels like years.
Now, I'm a sucker for sentiment: I cry easily at movies, while reading, and watching TV. But I do feel that we've been so conditioned to the rhythms of certain kinds of romances that they've begun to produce diminishing returns. For example, in The Ugly Truth, there is a nice set of two short scenes in the middle of an otherwise mediocre movie in which a fairly coarse, confident character retreats into himself as he acknowledges how attracted he is to a woman . It's not a bad little bit of acting, but because it seems almost certain that he and the woman will get together, despite a blond, bronzed, blue-eyed obstacle shaped like an eligible doctor standing in their way, it's hard to get worked into an emotional frenzy over it.
In District 9, the arc is exceedingly different. Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley, in a role that ought to spark a very promising career) enters the movie in a role universally declared to be the South African equivalent of Michael Scott. He is a mortal dork, sweater-vested, unable to get a body microphone on, convinced of his own competence, with a streak of cruelty wide enough to allow him to merrily destroy alien eggs and compare the sound to popcorn. When we hear that he's married to the daughter of an executive of the company he works for, the dastardly Multinational United, we figure him for an even deeper nebbish than we initially supposed, and her for some sort of deluded crazy--a South African Jan, to complete the analogy to The Office. Instead, Tania's gorgeous, loving, devoted, but not in a way that seems venal or off. From some of the movie's earliest moments, she tells her interviewer that she insisted that Wikus's things be brought back to the house after they have been removed in the course of an investigation. She throws a very sweet party to congratulate her husband on receiving a promotion he probably didn't deserve, complete with a cake that looks like MNU's headquarters, and guests packed into their small kitchen.
It's a modest and genuine kind of love, one that's hugely complicated when Wikus, who in the course of evicting aliens from the slum where they have been quarantined, messes about with a bit of alien technology, sprays some sort of liquid on himself, begins throwing up, bleeding black fluid, losing fingernails, and refuses to go to the hospital until he collapses, at which point it's discovered that his left hand has turned into a claw. Tania is kept from him, and her father lies to her, telling her that Wikus is dying as MNU experiments on him, ultimately deciding to harvest his organs. After Wikus escapes, his father-in-law spreads rumors that Wikus contracted his mutation by having sex with aliens, leading Tania to reject him. But she changes her mind, telling him she wants them to be together again.
Most movies would give them that reunion, and would give the audiences that relief. District 9's core courage lies in the fact that it doesn't. The movie hinges on a choice. The fluid that started Wikus's transformation can either heal him, or get the aliens he's allied himself with home, and Wikus ultimately makes the decision to let his comrades leave, and let the horrifying transformation he's been going through run its course. The movie ends with him ostensibly vanished, and with Tania unwrapping a small metal flower that's been left on her doorstep, telling herself it's absurd to even imagine it could be from her husband. But the last image in the film is of an alien folding another flower in a trash heap: Wikus can't go home to his wife, he's not human in any way that would let them bridge the massive divide that's opened up between them. But despite his shell, claws, and tentacles, Wikus's love for Tania ties him to the human world. Alien or man, he makes her the same kinds of gifts, loves her in the same way.
It's entirely wrenching, and it's earned. These characters have been through something dreadful (unlike the [very young] lovers in Ponyo, which I found unusually soft and un-rigorous for a Miyazaki movie), and when the movie ends, they're still going through it. I walked out of the theater feeling deeply touched, but also feeling like my emotions weren't equal to what the characters were experiencing. I think this is rare. Generally, I walk out of movies feeling like I've watched sort of reverse ghosts, people who are pleasantly cushioned and protected from the actual difficulties of life, who get to operate in patterns that I feel would make my life simpler if only I could live within those systems of risks and rewards. District 9 left me feeling like I'd never known heartache, never really known isolation, even though I, like most of us, have done my time as a grieving citizen of a nation of one. It's a truly grownup romance, a species that feels even rarer and more precious than a movie rooted in historical realities these days. I wish there were more of them.