Cary Joji Fukunaga’s short directorial career has been filled with numerous left-turns. Making a name for himself with his debut – the suspenseful Spanish-language thriller, Sin Nombre (2009) – Fukunaga then shifted to a chilly adaptation of Jane Eyre (2011). He also directed all eight episodes of the first season of “True Detective,” the 2014 crime series starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, helped write the script for the It films and most recently directed the latest James Bond flick. Somewhat buried under the bigger name projects is Fukunaga’s 2015 adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala’s novel, Beasts of No Nation. While Beasts may be Fukunaga’s most problematic work, it is still a notable entry for a director unafraid to embrace challenge in his filmography.
Above everything else, Fukunaga is an excellent technical director. Just look to some of the train sequences in Sin Nombre or that one episode of “True Detective” featuring one unbroken shot and it is clear Fukunaga has a vision. Beasts, which tells the story of a boy who is swept up in a civil war that has engulfed an unnamed West African country, is technically impressive. Fukunaga uses his camera to document atrocity after atrocity once protagonist Agu (Abraham Attah) is indentured into life as a child soldier. But much like Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001), there is a remove from the action, and as Agu and the rebels commit one horrific murder after another, it is easy to feel numb over the film’s generous 136-minute runtime.
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The film begins with Agu, before he becomes a child soldier, and his friends carrying around the frame of a television, hoping to sell this “imagination TV” to the Nigerian peacekeeping troops assigned to their town. Fukunaga allows us to see what the prospective buyers see through the hole where the screen once was: Agu and his friends clowning and putting on fake television shows. This charming pretense endears us immediately to Agu, even if his ex-schoolteacher father is irate when he finds half his television missing.
Via this screen within a screen technique, Fukunaga is exploring the idea of reality, and by detaching from one existence, Agu can rampage and kill with abandon. Emotional detachment is one thing, but Agu and the other men and children in his squadron are also under the constant influence of drugs. Once his town comes under siege and Agu is separated from his family, this schism between what appears to be real and what isn’t begins for the boy. After wandering the jungles, Agu falls in with a group of rebels led by Idris Elba’s Commandant, a bloodthirsty psychopath who pushes his young corps to heinous extremes, often under the penalty of death. The Commandant uses drugs, sexual abuse and mind games to keep control over Agu and the others. Despite Elba’s scenery-chewing performance, the Commandant feels like an underwritten abuser who spouts rhetorical nonsense with little nuance.
How can someone like Agu come back from committing so many atrocities? That is the most interesting question hanging over Beasts of No Nation, but unfortunately very little runtime is given to watching Agu heal. Instead, Fukunaga takes us from horrific scene to another, culminating in the murder of a mother and her young daughter that Agu and the men find hiding in a closet. Like all the scenes in the movie, this awful segment is constructed with the artistry we often see in a Fukunaga production, but as an emotional crescendo for Agu’s character, we’re already numbed by the previous two violent hours.
It was a painful weekend to revisit Beasts of No Nation. As the American public mourns the children and teachers killed in a mass shooting in Ulvade, Texas and a national debate rages over gun control, spending 136 minutes watching murder after murder felt unbearable. As a cautionary tale, Beasts of No Nation does its job. But as a psychological study of the effects of war and atrocity on a young mind, Fukunaga’s film feels more like a ride than a true examination of the horrors of war, exhausting the viewer for the wrong reasons.
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