The golden rule of real estate — location, location, location — applies a bit too neatly to Tsotsi, a little South African film that recently snagged a big American Oscar (Best Foreign Language Film of 2006, for those keeping score). It's always nice when movies take us to new places, and Tsotsi's world — the colorful, crime-ridden shantytowns just outside of Johannesburg — is somewhere that few American moviegoers have seen on screen, much less in real life. Then again, if it weren't for the exotic authenticity of the film's setting, there wouldn't be much here to remember.
Not that Tsotsi doesn't go out of its way to get our attention, diligently photographing its crowded, dusty ghettos with a sublime sepia glow that infuses even the skankiest environments with a sense of the poetic. Shooting a slum as if it's a little piece of heaven teetering on the precipice of hell may make an interesting first impression (calling to mind the infinitely better City of God, which performed a similar trick with the favelas of Rio), but Tsotsi rarely gets beyond pretty pictures and broad generalizations.
Tsotsi is a well-meaning but terminally superficial morality tale about a badly misbehaving man-child who calls himself Tsotsi (Presley Chweneyagae), which is Afrikaans slang for "thug." He has a real name, of course, but we don't learn it until much later (through a series of hackneyed flashbacks detailing a damaged childhood), and Tsotsi isn't telling.
Tight-lipped, toughened and totally self-invented, Tsoti's lack of a proper name is central to the movie's heavy-handed methodology: He's meant to be understood exclusively as one of the faceless, oppressed millions robbed of individuality by a soulless conspiracy of economics, politics and bad luck.
The irony here, it could easily be argued, is that by insisting we see its central character as such an enormous, unmitigated symbol, the film becomes complicit in the whole dehumanization process. At the very least, the movie's predilection for big messages over nuanced characterization — an inability to see the trees through the forest, you might say — makes for less-than-compelling viewing.
Tsotsi begins as its young anti-hero is hitting what looks very much like bottom, on the lam after a routine robbery that turned ugly then deadly. Tsotsi steals a car to make his getaway but makes a startling discovery — a squalling infant tucked away in the back seat — right around the time he runs the vehicle into a ditch. And that's where Tsotsi really starts to go wrong.
Tsotsi brings the baby back to his shantytown lair and, in his thuggishly inept way, attempts to care for it. He carries the kid around in a shopping bag, diapers it in old newspapers, and before we know it we're immersed in a bonding-while-bungling shtick that begins to make our intrepid criminal seem like just another, rougher version of one of the guys from Three Men and a Baby.
Tsoti's behavior begins to improve marginally (he finds himself stalking people just to chat with them, rather than rob them). He's on the verge of making a love connection with the woman he's commandeered to breastfeed the baby. And he starts paying closer attention when conflicted fellow gang members erupt with periodic lectures on the meaning of decency.
The movie manages to handle most of this with a straight face and, to its credit, generally avoids the trap of blatant sentimentality, but Tsotsi's narrative arc and its meanings couldn't be more in our faces. Over and over, the movie pounds home the message that Tsotsi is damaged goods seeking redemption, a well-meaning bad boy in mourning for his own lost innocence through the nurturing of a new human life.
As if this drumbeat weren't obvious enough, at one point the little thug even gives the infant a name — David — which turns out to be the very same birth-name that belonged to Tsotsi himself in his dimly remembered childhood, before the big, bad ol' world got the better of him.
But interesting as it might be to think of Tsotsi as some Vishnu-Shiva figure of preservation and destruction all rolled up in one (He mugs people! He changes diapers!), the movie doesn't dig particularly deep. Ultimately Tsotsi is more about easy slogans than it is about the nuances of character, more interested in manipulating our emotions than in exploring ideas.
It doesn't help that Chweneyagae, an actor of limited range, doesn't bring much complexity to the role of Tsotsi, nor that the script works mostly in shorthand, rushing to show us the terrible things its main character has done, and then just as quickly reversing itself to demonstrate the goodness he's capable of. The movie is terribly eager to get us on the same page as the anti-hero of its familiar redemption song, but does it really need to have him sprouting angelic wings even before he's established his demonic credentials?
At a relatively brisk 94 minutes, Tsotsi never really has a chance to get boring, but it mostly unfolds in broad, easily digestible chunks in predictable synch with a generic soundtrack of gangsta-rap-meets-world-beat (for the "tough" passages) and swooning synthesizers (signifying all that cosmic redemption waiting in the wings).
And while it's true that the movie has indeed snagged an Oscar (as well as an award or two at various prestigious film festivals), I suspect that's mostly for the wrong reasons. Tsotsi sucks us in with a few sequences of real emotional power, then coasts along as just the sort of over-earnest, under-ambitious morality tale that the Academy loves to award in its weaker moments.
Are there worse movies out there in foreign film land? Sure, lots and lots of them. But an awful lot of films are far better too, not that we'll get to see most of them. For every smoothly middlebrow Tsotsi that manages to secure a spot in one of our shrinking handful of local art houses, there are dozens of genuinely adventurous and astonishing masterpieces that, as a reward for their refusal to compromise, will never get to come in from the cold.
You could certainly do worse than Tsotsi, but it's ultimately safe, nondescript filmmaking that no amount of exotic ethnicities or unfamiliar terrain can disguise.
This article appears in Apr 12-18, 2006.