The Forgiven

Based on Michael Ashton’s 2011 play The Archbishop and the Antichrist, this intense docudrama examines the (fictionalized) relationship between the iconic South African cleric Desmond Tutu and a notorious, white-supremacist murderer who is seeking clemency. In the mid-1990s when the Archbishop (Forest Whitaker) was appointed by then-President Nelson Mandela to head the Truth and Reconciliation Committee to confront the atrocities of apartheid, one of the most notorious defendants was Afrikaner Piet Blomfeld (Eric Bana), an unrepentantly racist psychopath. Incarcerated in Cape Town’s brutal maximum-security Pollsmoor Prison, Blomfeld’s past is explored in flashbacks, juxtaposed with a larger investigation of Operation Hacksaw—a police conspiracy that resulted in the disappearance of a black teenager whose grieving mother (Thandi Makhubele) pleads for justice in a climactic courtroom scene. Burdened by a distracting prosthetic nose, Whitaker nevertheless delivers a powerhouse performance that’s been enthusiastically endorsed by Tutu himself, and he’s matched by Bana’s charismatic savagery. But director Roland Joffe’s The Forgiven is unfortunately unfocused, slowly paced, and overly earnest. And its theatrical origins are obvious, resulting in stilted, talky confrontations. Optional. (S. Granger)