# Good Man in Africa, A (1994)

### reviewed by
Eric Mankin

                              A GOOD MAN IN AFRICA
                           A film review by Eric Mankin
                            Copyright 1994 Eric Mankin

Director Bruce Beresford's earnest straightforwardness served well enough in dramas like DRIVING MISS DAISY or even MR. JOHNSON but rapidly sinks this attempt at an Evelyn Waugh/Kingsley Amis comedy of manners. To be fair, it's not likely anyone else could have done better with William Boyd's script (from his novel of the same name), which rounds up the usual British comedy suspects, and runs them through numbingly familiar colonial games of sex and social climbing.

Set in a fictional West African country, the story offers Colin Friels as a Lucky Jim-like British foreign service climber named Morgan Leafy, stuck under the thumb of supertwit High Commissioner Fanshawe (John Lithgow honking an pseud-Sloane accent). Leafy has to balance the logistics of an impending visit from a member of the royal family and sub-rosa bribery of local politicians with the demands of his African girlfriend Hazel (Jackie Mofokeng) and sexual targets of opportunity including Fanshawe's wife (Diana Rigg) and daughter (Sarah-Jane Fenton), and the wife (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer) of a local nationalist leader (Louis Gossett Jr.).

The Africa outside the embassy walls is presented solely as a source of exotic plot complications to put Leafy into a comic lather--sketchy, anachronistic, visually lackluster, and, with locals rolling their eyes fearfully at the name of the thunder god Shango, borderline racist stereotype. It's no better inside the embassy, with Dame Rigg given a line like "I want our loins to mingle." Friels is good, in his Michael-J.-Fox frantic way and Sean Connery is perfect as the "good man" of the title, an incorruptible doctor with a gift for wry understatement, but neither rescue the proceedings from the level of not very inspired silliness.

    Eric Mankin

    .

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews