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| EndGame |
Topic: Endgame
Author:
Independent, & Guardian,
May 2009
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The Independent: Reviewed by Brian Viner
This was the superb Endgame, which dramatised the secret negotiations in deepest Somerset in the late 1980s – courageously brokered by Michael Young, the public-affairs director of Consolidated Goldfields – between exiled leaders of the African National Congress and prominent Afrikaners, with a view to ending apartheid. Young was played by Jonny Lee Miller, whose intriguing CV includes the part of Sick Boy in Trainspotting and a three-year marriage to Angelina Jolie, yet here he radiated the quiet, uncharismatic decency of a man with a mousey wife at home in Surbiton, or possibly Gerrards Cross. It was, if Consolidated Goldfields will forgive me for invoking another kind of mining operation, a compact gem of a performance, out-glittered by others around it, but no less valuable.
Almost everything about Endgame was irreproachable. Paula Milne wrote a characteristically powerful script, to which a wonderful cast did full justice, while Pete Travis's taut, documentary-style direction fitted the piece perfectly, imbuing it with the moody suspense of a thriller. The complexities of the story and the need to represent so many people familiar to us, such as Nelson Mandela, P W Botha, Oliver Tambo and Thabo Mbeki, meant that neither Milne nor Travis had a straightforward task. Nor, for that matter, did the actors. But Clarke Peters perfectly conveyed Mandela's strength and dignity, and Timothy West, in what was sadly little more than a cameo, played P W Botha as a kind of Afrikaans version of Bradley Hardacre, his monstrous despot in the sitcom Brass of beloved memory.
However, it was Chiwetel Ejiofor as Mbeki, and William Hurt as the philosophy professor Will Esterhuyse, who glittered brightest. Invited by Young to represent white South Africa in the talks with the ANC, Esterhuyse felt morally compromised between his distaste for apartheid and his loathing for ANC-sponsored violence, and Hurt captured that ambivalence splendidly. Nobody does a more eloquent frown than Hurt, and here, as in his recent turn as the tortured Daniel Purcell in Damages, he had plenty to frown about.
He pretty much nailed the accent, too, with only a very occasional detour into cockney, reminding me of a friend of mine who recently walked into a travel agent in Holland Park, self-styled specialists in trips to South Africa, to ask how he could get to East London. "Just take the Central Line," said the young woman behind the desk, guilelessly. Hurt accidentally took the Central Line only a couple of times.
It was hard to spot the frailties in Endgame. I did wonder whether the phrase "collateral damage" would have been casually dropped as long ago as 1988, but if anachronism it was, it wasn't exactly a jet flying overhead during the chariot race in Ben-Hur. Less forgivably, there was a rogue apostrophe in the line at the end about it taking another four years before South Africa held "it's first democratic elections". But maybe that was only in the preview version I saw. And so what? On the whole, Endgame was a towering piece of television.
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The Guardian. Reviewed by Sam Wollaston
This is South Africa, in the second half of the 80s, the beginning of the end of apartheid. How do you possibly make a drama about something so momentous? Well, like this, I'd say, because Endgame is fabulous. It tells the bigger picture through looking at the detail, focusing on a series of secret talks (although it seems that everyone knew about them) held between ANC leaders and prominent Afrikaners.
Chiwetel Ejiofor, William Hurt and Jonny Lee Miller are all excellent as, respectively, key attendees Thabo Mbeki, philosophy professor Willie Esterhuyse, and Michael Young - who, as a British businessman working in South Africa at the time, was able to set the meetings up.
These talks took place not in South Africa but in a grand country house in Somerset, which adds a nice incongruity. Layers of mistrust are slowly and painfully chipped away, in preparation for the delicate dismantling of the world's most unjust and inhuman regime, while outside chestnut stallions snort and whinny happily in their stately paddocks, and those Daimlers crunch elegantly along tree-lined gravel drives.
Interspersed with scenes of English pastoral bliss and the diplomacy going on inside (and to remind us what this is all about), there is action from South Africa - riots, brutal policing, thugs in fat pick-up trucks, mistrust, spying, a certain prisoner nearing the end of his Long Walk, terror and the awful uncertainty of what will happen when a key is turned in a car's ignition.
What it all adds up to is a film that thrills as well as informs, that is as tense and gripping as it is human and moving. It captures a place and time in history, and you can't really ask much more than that of television
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EndGame |
| Independent, & Guardian, May 2009 |
| Author: |
| Topic:Endgame |
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End Game |
| Variety , January 2009 |
| Author:JUSTIN CHANG |
| Topic:Endgame |
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