# Endurance (1998)

### reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten

    ENDURANCE

     Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D.
     Disney Pictures
     Director:  Leslie Woodhead
     Writer:  Leslie Woodhead
     Cast: Haile Gebrselassie, Shawanness Gebrselassie,
    Gebrselassie Bekele

If you lived in Manhattan and decided to run from West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village to West 125 Street in Harlem, how would you negotiate the trip? Would you go full speed ahead? Begin fast, then slow down, finally speed up to the wire? An even more important question: would you even make it to your destination? This six-mile journey is more or less the distance that an Olympic runner has to cover in a long-distance marathon, whose standard length is 10,000 meters. To cover this tract of land, an athlete needs both speed and endurance, but running, like any more complex sport, requires training. In the movie "Endurance," director Leslie Woodhead takes us into the legs, lungs and mind of Haile Gebrselassie, considered by at least one major periodical on the sport to be the greatest long-distance racer of all time. "Endurance" is a solid work that avoids both the talking-heads tedium of a documentary and the rah-rah Hollywood histrionics of an action-packed sports drama like "Pre." A docudrama, the film features Haile Gebrselassie as himself, his real-life father Bekele Gebrselassie and wife playing themselves, with his sister in the role of his mother, his nephew as the athlete in his pre-pubescent days, and his first cousin playing his dad during Gebrselassie's youth.

The film alternates between Atlanta, the home of the 1966 Olympics, and the Ethiopian village of Asela. As we in a Western audience takes in Ivan Strasburg's sharply focused camerawork, we can't help feeling conflicted as we marvel at the Spartan beauty of the African countryside while feeling compassion for the hardscrabble lives of its residents. Young Haile could not be blamed for being more interested in running the six miles to school each day than in doing his share of the family chores on his farm. He lives in a one- room mud hut that houses the twelve human members of his family and apparently some oxen and goats as well. To maintain this questionable life style requires hard work by all. One contingent must set out regularly with donkeys to make the three-hour trip to a source of drinking water while others till the fields with human and animal labor rather than with the modern technology so common in the West. Haile's dad wants the boy to work in an office as a lawyer or a clerk, an understandable aspiration given the bodily requirements of farming, but Haile wants only to run and at the age of 17 disobeys his father by moving to the capital, Addis Ababa, to take part in a national training program.

While the film's subject is the sport of long-distance running, its real star is the African people who perform their rituals before a camera as though they were professional actors. When Haile's mother (Shawanness Gerbrselassie) falls ill in the field while carrying a heavy pitcher of water, she is transported to the hospital on a makeshift stretcher and carried to a rickety public bus for transportation to the hospital. At her funeral, her friends and neighbors gather around the hut to chant "Cry for your mother" and shed genuine tears as though they were participating in the death rites of one of their own loved ones. (When these local people were asked behind the scenes how they managed to conjure the tears, they said simply that they imagined the dead person to be one of their own, dear relatives--an example of method acting, Ethiopian style.)

Thanks to some elegant tracking shots, we see Haile running like a cheetah across the parched land of his birth, the only sounds coming from the hyped-up, exciting beats of the soundtrack featuring ethnic Ethiopian songs of all varieties. He seems equally at ease when winning the gold medal he took at the '96 Olympics in Atlanta, the sounds of heavy breathing coming from the soundtrack rather than from his own mouth.

The film is framed by the great athletic event with an unfortunate opening spotlighting the movie's star sitting on a hill in his native land speaking in halting English rather than his native Amharic. Strangely, he uses the annoying verbal tic "you know" five or six times, unusual when you consider that he was not brought up in an English-speaking society that considers this mannerism almost a rite of passage. Some of the dialogue comes across as stilted, as when Haile's dad asks him to remain and seek an office job only to have the young man respond, in effect, "I am going. Goodbye." But we must remember that this is a docudrama, not a feature film, and should be grateful that we are not forced to endure a talking-heads documentary. "Endurance" crosses the finish line at an appropriate 83 minutes, a movie which makes up for its relative deficiency of conflict and setbacks by its bold, stirring meditation on the lives of people in one of the world's poorest countries.

    Rated G.  Running Time: 83 minutes.  (C) 1999
    Harvey Karten

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