It took the cause and message of A Dry White Season for Marlon Brando to leave his self-imposed exile in Tahiti to come back to the screen, albeit in a small supporting role. Still the cause was one of the most remarkable in the 20th Century, the eventually successful opposition to the white apartheid government of the Union of South Africa.
A Dry White Season was originally a novel concerned with the aftermath of the famous Soweto Massacre when South African troops fired on a protest of black Bantu children being forced to learn in Afrikaans the language of the oppressor as Desmond Tutu so eloquently put it.
The son of the gardener at Donald Sutherland's estate is killed in Soweto and his body is not returned. After which the gardener Winston Ntshona is picked up by the special branch of the South African Police for asking too many questions and later he dies in prison the result of a suicide which no one with a functioning brain believes. At that point Sutherland decides to intervene himself.
Sutherland plays a history teacher in a white only school and as he learns about what's going on and starts asking the questions he dare not ask before even to himself. His radicalization is total, but it costs him dear, his wife Janet Suzman and his daughter Sussanah Harker leave him, but his young son Rowen Elnes sticks with dad.
It's not that he doesn't gain a few new friends, African National Congress organizer Zakes Mokae, crusading journalist Susan Sarandon, and human rights attorney Marlon Brando. But he also gains a bitter and malevolent enemy in Special Branch Captain Jurgen Prochnow who apparently does damage control for the government. That includes outright murder of suspected opposition to the apartheid government.
Every actor worth his salt loves a courtroom scene and Marlon Brando might have even come back for that in this film as well as the anti- apartheid cause. He got the film's only Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but lost to Denzel Washington for Glory. I suspect given Marlon's history with Oscar folks were reluctant to vote for him.
The film really belongs to star Donald Sutherland though and I think it a pity he wasn't given any Oscar nomination for this fine film with an eternal message about freedom.
