Reeling: A Small Act
Posted on 10. May, 2010 by Simon in Film, Reeling
“A Small Act” is a documentary attempting to accomplish no small feat. It does so with no attempt to hide its agenda nor any conceit towards compromising function for form. Make no mistake, Jennifer Arnold’s tearjerking tale has a singular purpose: to spread kindness like a zombie apocalypse — but, you know, the type of zombies who eat social injustice instead of brains.
Although “A Small Act” often feels single minded due to its altruistic machinations, an eclectic ensemble and high production values make the doc seem greater than the sum of its parts.
Arnold starts with the story of Chris Mburu, a Kenyan alumni of Harvard Law school, and Hilde Back, the childhood benefactor who made Mburu’s rags-to-U.N. global coordinator story financially possible. Arnold dovetails the two unlikely protagonists like a third world remix of The Blind Side.
Back, a Swedish refugee of Holocaust victims spent her middle aged years donating monthly sums to sponsor a faceless African child — Mburu — like so many other Western well-wishers.
Unbeknownst to Back, Mburu, who like most recipients of aid never met his good samaritan, ended up in Geneva after attending Harvard on a Fulbright scholarship. Eventually, he started his own scholarship for underprivileged Kenyan kids who couldn’t afford secondary school. In honour of Back, he named his fund after her despite never having met or seen his self proclaimed “guardian angel”.
Mburu eventually tracks Back down and the audience is treated to the cliched (yet frankly, effective) sight of a beaming young Kenyan man embracing a tiny old Jewish senior citizen as if she were his long lost mother. At one point, Mburu even gives Bank a Harvard Mom sweatshirt for her birthday during a poignant and hilarious party attended by a gaggle of likewise endearing granny gal pals (we get it — old people are cute, happy Kenyan dudes are endearing — win win!).
The real heart of Arnold’s film however takes place not in Geneva but the home Mburu left behind in central Kenya. Not much has changed since Mburu’s childhood, and kids still regularly fall by the wayside of education due to the prohibitive costs of schooling and an entrenched cultural attitude of nihilism. Is this defeatism a self-fulfilling prophesy? Arnold seems to be asking the audience. Alas, this is a rhetorical question. The answer is no — if you would just stop being such a tightwad.
But I digress. Here in rural Africa we meet Kimani, Ruth and Caroline, three primary school children in the same public school class. The three youngsters are the top academic achievers in their class and all three aspire for a high-school educated future as a means to escape poverty. Unfortunately, all three children are crushingly poor and, without financial aid, seem destined to a life of picking coffee beans or worse, although we are never really told what “worse” entails.
The rest of the film dramatizes the intense pressure the children have in achieving their goals, heightened by the darwinian nature of their predicament and a surrounding cauldron of political uncertainty. The kids take a single final primary school exam with their scholarship chances hinging on the balance of their mark. For all intents and purposes, only the top percentile of exam takers will get to continue in their studies. The rest… well, sorry you live in Kenya!
Essentially, in its latter half “A Small Act” devolves into so many dramas about under privileged kids beating the odds and breaking a cycle of cultural malaise (see: “Dangerous Minds”, “Finding Forrester”, the aforementioned Blind Side). I won’t get into the racially dogmatic sandbox this documentary seems to play in, but trust me, it’s there.
As a result, the ultimate fates of the three children are predictable, and at times the characters in “A Small Act” seem marginalized by the greater social issues Arnold is using them in her film to highlight.
Despite all the cliches however, and the jaded cynicism of North American audience donor fatigue, Arnold’s lens does manage to capture pathos in her three young dreamers made possible perhaps only by virtue of her medium.
One realizes that behind all the rehashed books, World Vision informercials, spammish e-mail chains and Hollywood dramatizations of needy upstart children, there are, you know, real kids out there. And indeed, this may be the greatest achievement of “A Small Act” and the ultimate goal of every documentary — telling the same story but successfully reminding you the stakes are real.
As sick as the audience might be of this plot, when the realization finally hits that this is a documentary and not a movie; when it dawns that the pressures foisted on these children are all too real; the maw of hopelessness they face not just a fictionalized construct; the tears silently streaming down the faces of the children on screen finally hit their mark.
Yes, “A Small Act” is manipulative and derivative and I have no doubt many will be nonplussed about the par-for-the-course altruism it extolls. Regardless, I think it’s fair to say that this is an example where you’d be hard pressed to not want the ends to justify the means.
