Cold Case, cold film

It's not often that I get stuck with the "blank page" writer's phenomenon. You know, that point where you're just staring at the page/screen and not knowing how to actually apply words to it? But in trying to keep up with my pseudo-promise to review all of the films we see at the Michigan/State, I kind of struggled with Cold Case Hammarskjöld. It's not because it was great and I didn't know how to encompass it. It's certainly not because it was bad and I didn't know how to get started ranting (see: any of my coverage of Game of Thrones' final season or True Detective's second season if you want to see loquaciousness in the service of bad productions.) It's because it wasn't much of... anything. It's not as if there isn't substance to the film. There certainly is. It's loaded with facts that reflect the colonial exploitation of Africa, the dirty wars that accompanied and followed that exploitation, the influence of massive corporations in those wars, racism, disease, and the turbulent political period following World War II and the introduction of the Cold War. It is all of those things. But it's also somewhere between a newsreel and a Twitter thread in its presentation of them.

The film examines the death of former United Nations secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, in a plane crash in what was then Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia.) As Hammarskjöld was a fervent reformer and champion for the rights of those who had been (or still were) under the colonial boot, he had a lot of enemies. As the plane crash was very swiftly examined and buried by the Rhodesian authorities, it's never been far from the thoughts of many people that the crash was actually a calculated assassination. This is the premise of the film, as Danish filmmaker Mads Brügger and Swedish journalist Göran Björkdahl interview people both involved in the clean-up and those who claim to be part of the mercenary outfit that actually carried out the crime, the South African Institute for Maritime Research. The film continues down that rabbit hole, exploring the possible paymasters behind SAIMR and the various other projects that the Institute was involved in, ranging from pedestrian white supremacy to attempted genocide.

Sounds fascinating, right? And it probably would have been for someone who hadn't already spent many years reading about that activity. There were several moments in the film where I would have been more interested by an exploration of the larger picture beyond what was hinted at, but they quite properly avoided that and tried to stay focused on Hammarskjöld's death, for the most part. But that also set the film up to be something like a first draft of a screenplay for a police procedural, without any real narrative or character, except the interjection of the two filmmakers in something of a Mr. Bean role, as they fumble around trying to dig up the wreckage of the infamous crash. I think they tried to compensate for the fact that they were laying things out in pretty straightforward fashion by showing Brügger dictating the story to two different transcribers and showing their reactions to both the story and his elaborations upon it. The fact that both transcribers were Black does kind of dovetail with one of the more explosive elements of the conspiracy story, but I'm not sure if that was intentional or coincidental.

Of course, the conspiracy is kind of the central conceit of the film and, in that respect, it's just like watching Oliver Stone's JFK. The surrounding plot and performances run secondary to the theme in that film in the same way they do with this one. But it's the manner of delivery that kind of stalls out here. If you're already aware of the mountain of evidence out there about the activities of South African mercenary groups, then it's not difficult to believe that what's being presented here is true. But it's also not that interesting because the filmmakers take pains to not dramatize the possibilities, as Stone did in his film. For documentarians, that's a laudable goal. But it also kind of saps the life from the presentation in this case. And that's strange for me because it sounded like a great idea. I'm a Cold War enthusiast. I used to live and breathe that stuff. I have board games sitting in my house based on that period, mostly because they're about the Cold War, as opposed to whether they're any good on a rainy afternoon (They are.) But this film just didn't sing to me. I walked away from it thinking more about the casual reference in one moment to Jonas Savimbi, rather than about the film itself, because there's actually more story around the former UNITA leader.

I won't say that it's not worth your time, as I think it is. It's just that I wish it were more worth it.