Waiting for the Barbarians
The one thing that best describes Ciro Guerra's film Waiting for the Barbarians is a majorly missed opportunity. Every piece of the puzzle in Guerra's film is there to make something quite extraordinary. The talent of its cast list, ranging from Mark Rylance, Robert Pattinson and Johnny Depp, the cinematography talents of Chris Menges, and the directing vision from Guerra himself.
To start off reasonably positive, it must be noted that Menges’ cinematography here looks fabulous. Yes, it is often sanded down with little colour present. However, it is sweeping in intimacy, and when the feature opens up, Menges captures the scale of the setting in a searching and on occasion sweeping sense of style.
Unbelievably, Waiting for the Barbarians is not only a thematically hollow feature but a missed opportunity to make a consciously relevant film on colonialism and its effects. What the film entails is a crisis of confidence of a gatekeeper in a one-note performance from Rylance with only glorified cameos to round the feature up.
Waiting for the Barbarians is a mess. It does little to shed light on a community under fire from colonial and political fire of fury but instead hinders on a white saviour element. Rylance, in his usual bumbling, soft-spoken schtick, tries to ratify a character engulfed in guilt and a slow but assured understanding that he is not only a problem but the catalyst of the trauma itself.
The problem is the material does not extend to be in any way compelling, captivating or engaging. Rylance's character’s turn comes far too late and is incredibly loose in its conviction. Made more bizarre is the bait and switch of its supporting cast, who are both in there too little too late. Depp invokes his usual enigmatic motif and does reasonably well at electing mood, even if again it is opaque.
Pattinson, similarly uses the same technique and restraint of dialogue with a dependence on evidently visible emotion, in this case being anger. However, the conviction is not only hollow, but it is mediocrely flat due to the lack of investment regarding the characters' motifs or agenda. Perhaps this is a conscious decision to have Pattinson's character enigmatic to a purpose and have the character loose to the highest bidder with no agenda at all a more robust and terrifying notion.
The lack of voice and inciting comments on colonialism and the political prison of this setting is also absurdly lacking. For a film that has a central conversation on an uprising from colonial gatekeepers, writer-director not wanting to dig deep and even remotely attempt at investigating this theme, is frighteningly telling of the lack of commitment and maturity to discuss the material at hand.
The theme of lacking depth and purpose is a notion that before long begins to define the feature overall. To put in bluntly, Guerra's Waiting for the Barbarians is flat style with zero substance. The one redeeming quality the film has is its harrowing final image that elicits an incredibly haunting feeling. That being said, it is too little too late for a film that skates around its themes and ideologies and presents an unsteady and uninteresting character study with little results.
