'Waiting For The Barbarians': Mark Rylance Is Terrific In Ciro Guerra's Beautiful Indictment Of The Colonial Machine [Venice Review]

Colonizers don’t adapt. They force others to, impaling the lungs of culture, severing the limbs of autonomy, squeezing the heart of the human will until it pops into bloody oblivion. Moreover, they’re proud enough of what they do to stick out like a sore thumb while doing it, as the first metaphor in director Ciro Guerra’s new film, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” makes abundantly clear—an image of an endless desert gated by giant, distant mountain ranges with a small, sandy fortress sitting quietly in the middle, the only man-made structure within hundreds, if not thousands, of miles in every direction.

READ MORE: 2019 Venice Film Festival Preview: 15 Must-See Movies

The J.M. Coetzee adaptation (penned for the screen by the author himself) rarely departs from the multi-tiered desert fortress, a tan silt and stone outpost with a population of a couple hundred at most, and a Moroccan steampunk design that would make it the most Instagram-able chic hotel in 2020 if Guerra and Coetzee were to turn it into a film pilgrimage destination. Crispian Sallis and Domenico Sica’s production design is stunning, stirring, and elegant, tightly packed shelves of books, scrolls, and artifacts adorning every candlelit room, the tidy clutter complimenting the vast expanse of nothingness that surrounds them.

READ MORE: ‘Waiting For The Barbarians’: Ciro Guerra Shows Off First Clip Of Johnny Depp & Mark Rylance

The magistrate (a terrific Mark Rylance) of the small military stronghold is a humble, kind, nonviolent, and generous man, the last you’d associate with military praxis, much less concepts of colonialism. He wears a khaki uniform like his underlings, of which there aren’t many. He scarcely makes demands, but when he does, they’re spoken with a warm, welcoming earnestness. In his spare time, he explores his anthropological and archaeological side, collecting objects and relics of ages past, like an ancient iteration of a baby’s shoe, which he handles as preciously and delicately as parents would their newborn. The magistrate radiates monkish energy, at times so drenched in ascetic ways of being that he physically embodies a hermit. The indigenous people love and appreciate him, as he does them.

READ MORE: 2019 Fall Preview: The 45 Most Anticipated Films

Colonel Joll (Johnny Depp), on the other hand, is the magistrate’s antithesis. He’s a stiff, stolid, formal, unflinchingly devoted military man. He’s much freakier than your average cruel officer, mostly due to his thick, golden steampunk glasses with their deep black lenses and protruding, double-pronged bridge. Like the magistrate, he’s always calm, but where the magistrate’s tone communicates openness, Joll’s communicates violence, the greatest tool of the oppressor in spreading the disease of hopelessness. “Pain is truth. All else is subject to doubt,” Joll states coldly and ambiguously, the magistrate bewildered as to what his arrival is all about. He learns quickly, and, ironically, the truth is pain.

Rejecting the flustered magistrate’s advice, Joll and company set out on a series of trips into the desert to capture members of the indigenous nomad community that migrates to and from the mountains. He considers the frontier lands of the desert the first line of defense for the empire they serve, and he’s sure of an impending barbarian attack, despite the magistrate’s insistence upon the peace between them, which is quite evident to any non-colonizer. Joll and his men ruthlessly and creatively torture the captured men, women, and children to attain information and eventually return home, promising another visit soon on similar grounds. Notwithstanding how central torture is to the film, we see very little of it and most comes after the arrival of Joll’s repulsively violent apprentice, Officer Mandel (Robert Pattinson).

The magistrate is horrified by the blood-stained walls of the holding cell, the scars left by conquer. He releases all survivors only to find himself taking care of a girl (Gana Bayarsaikhan) who couldn’t make the trek because Joll snapped her ankles. He cares for her tenderly, washing her feet as if he might be able to rinse off the scars and piece her back together. It isn’t long before he falls in love with the girl and his life takes a significant turn for the worse as he tries to excise himself from the colonial machine he’d been unknowingly complicit in for so long.

READ MORE: The 100 Most Anticipated Films Of 2019

On the surface, ‘Barbarians’ pits the colonial mindset against the biblically meek mindset—a showdown between the wicked ferocity of human erasure and the strange beauty of human connection and care. But beneath the surface, it’s about how all of us—no matter how honest, upright, and ethically-minded one might be—are complicit in the harm caused by the federal or capitalist machine we benefit from. And if we don’t use its proper gears and channels of progress, we will come to know the devastation of what it truly to means to stand up against it, to be outside of it, as the magistrate does. The empire (i.e. corrupt militaries, government systems, and leaders) craves power and progress. Value then lies in the achievement instead of the achiever, and those that cannot contribute properly to progress are worthless. Peace is less evolutionary than progress. In peace, the struggle for power evaporates into the clouds and its rain washes away the competition of conquest that breeds forced progress.

Coetzee’s screenplay captures this magnificently, the transition from fiction to the screen evidence of his pure, daedal writing ability. He infuses the language of commerce into the imperial authorities (“enterprise,” “cooperation,” administrators,” etc.), drawing parallels between the power-craving corruption of corporations and military-industrial complexes alike. The metaphors are a bit too numerous and on the nose at times, but Rylance’s unbelievable performance overshadows the minor downfalls.

The ever-shifting, string-heavy score is at times sleepy, dooming, mournful, stretched, gentle, and scratchy, channeling “The Rains of Castamere” vibes ever so often. Chris Menges’ landscape cinematography is gorgeous—desert mountain dusks and dawns bathing in rich gradients of turquoise and amber. The amount of time spent shooting at golden hour alone must’ve made for some stressful days on set. But Guerra clearly had no problem directing, the engrossing synchronicity of every aspect of the film a testament to his visionary mind. [B+] – Luke Hicks

Click here to read more of our coverage from the 2019 edition of the Venice Film Festival.