Show Business: One Star in a Huge Black Sky

South Africa, 1958. Red dust, low green hills. A bride and groom make their way through a crowd of swaying villagers who clap and chant a ritual wedding song. Tribesmen draped in striped blankets beat the rhythm on painted drums. After the marriage feast, the couple walk in the countryside. She gathers the train of her bridal dress with one hand; the other is intertwined in his. “If only we didn’t have to go back,” he says. She looks up, all fresh anticipation. “I wonder what our life will be like?” she asks. Then: “I know one thing. Life with you is life without you.”

These stark words foreshadow the next 29 years in the life of Nelson Mandela, the spiritual leader of South Africa’s black majority, who is now serving a life sentence for sabotage and plotting revolution. Starring Danny Glover as Nelson and Alfre Woodard as his wife Winnie, Mandela, an HBO movie premiering Sept. 20 at 8 p.m. EDT, traces the couple’s unfinished struggle against institutionalized racism in South Africa. It is also the melancholy love story of Winnie, now 50, and Nelson, 69, who wed during a break in his trial for treason and honeymooned while he was in the dock. Because of his political activities and 25-year-long imprisonment, the pair have spent only a few months of their married life together.

Mandela is Hollywood’s first major effort to present South Africa’s racial troubles to an American mass audience. The movie is already under attack. Even before he saw it, the Rev. Jerry Falwell referred to it as “Communist propaganda” and threatened a Moral Majority boycott of HBO during September. Claiming that Mandela is “pro-terrorist,” Citizens for Reagan, a lobbying group, has said it will call on its 100,000 members to cancel their HBO subscriptions. In response, HBO Chairman Michael Fuchs declared that viewers should make up their own minds about the movie.

The struggle against apartheid is a story whose time has come for the film industry. Camille Cosby, wife of Comedian Bill Cosby, owns the rights to Winnie Mandela’s autobiography and plans to produce a TV movie about her. The Mandelas figure prominently in an ABC-TV historical mini-series, still in the works, which has excited the interest of Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Jane Fonda. Three theatrical movies probing racial conflict in South Africa are on the way. The first and most prestigious of the three is Cry Freedom, directed by Sir Richard Attenborough (Gandhi). Due in early November, it explores the friendship between Stephen Biko (Denzel Washington), the black leader who died in prison after police interrogation, and Donald Woods, a white anti-apartheid newspaper editor (Kevin Kline). Coming next spring is Atlantic’s A World Apart, about a family caught in the racial strife of the 1960s, with Barbara Hershey. Also planned: The Long Weekend, to star Julian Sands as Neil Aggett, the first white activist to die in jail.

Apartheid may shadow these productions as it did HBO’s groundbreaking Mandela. It was shot last fall in Zimbabwe, where armed soldiers guarded the set. (The local office of the exiled African National Congress had been bombed six months before.) When curious farmworkers gathered around and learned that a movie about Mandela was being shot, they waved their arms and shouted, “Man-de-la! Man-de-la!” Recalls Woodard: “Zimbabwe is newly free and glistening with hope. Having South African refugees all around us gave the script new urgency.”

Winnie Mandela, unbowed in the prolonged battle she wages in her husband’s name against racial repression, was an elusive presence to the filmmakers. Since her husband was jailed, she has been restricted, held in solitary confinement and banned. Scriptwriter Ronald Harwood arranged to interview her in the Orange Free State, where she had been forced to move, but when Winnie drove up to the meeting place where Harwood was waiting, she reversed suddenly, then accelerated away. He never found out why.

At the heart of the drama is the relationship of two people who had no physical contact for 22 years and were long limited to the rare letter and visit. Together, Woodard, with her serene face and molten core, and Glover, an actor of towering force and compassion, transcend an otherwise ordinary hagiography. As a young bride, Winnie draws her strength from Nelson’s huge, healing hands cupped around her face. When she visits him in prison, Winnie, wearing native dress, brings to him the exalted dignity that she has painfully won. Surrounded by guards, separated by plate glass, they are only allowed to say, “How are you?” “I’m fine.” “How are you?” “Fine.” “And the children?” “They are fine.” Their eyes and smiles speak a silent reminder of apartheid’s terrible human cost.

Unfortunately the filmmakers will not leave it at that. The movie is preachy and laden with speeches that hobble the narrative. Intricate political positions are drawn with a numbing oversimplification. All South African policemen are sadistic slobs with warty faces. Nelson is an immaculate martyr, always stoic. Winnie is a saint. But for all its flaws, Mandela does dramatize a country’s deadly turmoil. “South Africa has been locked off for so long,” says Woodard. “I’m hoping for other movies. Mandela is just one star in a huge black sky.”