DUMA

Although Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Oscar for best actor last night, one of the most remarkable performances in a film last year was the name character in Carroll Ballard's Duma. Granted, the role was played by a cheetah or, to be accurate, several cheetahs, but damn if those cheetah's couldn't act! As enjoyable a performance as Hoffman gave, he didn't do it in a fur coat, running at a 114 kilometers per hour.

The screening I went to was as well attended as any I've seen at the NWFF. As could be expected at a kid's movie, it was filled with families and kids and old people. Not my kind of audience [especially when the two kids sitting next to me were eating popcorn out of a crinkly paper bag], but a few minutes into the the film the fidgeting, chattering and crinkling stopped.

Duma tells the story of a Xan, a 12-year old boy [Alexander Michaletos] who adopts an orphaned cheetah and then, semi-orphaned himself, seeks to return the cheetah to the wild. In this he is assisted by Rip [Eamonn Walker], a wanderer who scrounges for his fortune in abandoned diamond mines. It's a film full of balances. Certain emotional events are elided or handled fairly elliptically and many scenes are truer to the fiction of a boy's adventure story than social reality, but the film doesn't throw rhetorical bullshit. In the big philosophical set piece where Rip talks to Xan about the temporalities of life, the sentiments are delivered in a straightforward, honest way.

Though at times you can sense the wheels turning, of the writers trying to negotiate the elements of the story without falling into one cliché or another, it basically works. They don't avoid the realities of Africa, but neither do they dwell on them. Rip references the hardships he has faced in his goal to succeed as a black villager and Xan clearly comes from a somewhat privileged white family, but the film handles these differences in a light-handed way. Indeed, the characters exist very much in the present, engaged as they are in the challenges of their adventure.

A similar dynamic is at play in Duma's treatment of nature. Although beautifully shot, the film notes that nature is essentially indifferent and dangerous. The note isn't hit particularly hard, though, and the various hazards of their voyage are negotiated successfully. There's even a cutesy element involving a bush baby. But, after a point, you've got to cut the film some slack. It is, after all, a kid's picture, not an adult drama or a Herzog documentary, and as such it works wonderfully. Both Michaletos and Walker give strong performances and there are nice supporting parts by Cambell Scott and Hope Davis [in their fourth film together]. And hey, there's the cheetahs!

Northwest Film Forum has extended its run of DUMA over the next two weekends, Mar 18 & 19 and Mar 25 & 26. DUMA will be playing matinees both weekends at 4pm Sat & Sun. Playdates for the extended run will be Sat, Mar 18, 4pm; Sun, Mar 19, 4pm; Sat Mar 25, 4pm and Sun, Mar 26, 4pm.