Well-crafted 'Inside'
pulls viewers into
prison's madness
By Michael Wilmington, TRIBUNE MOVIE CRITIC. Originally published February 14, 1997
Few movies have ever gotten across the terror of incarceration as powerfully as "Inside," director Arthur Penn and writer Bima Stagg's scorching chamber drama about a turnabout in a South African jail. Watching this movie -- most of which takes place in a small prison block and interrogation office in Johannesburg -- you can feel, almost physically, the hurt and defiance of the prisoners, the sadism and ambivalence of their guards, the terrifying lassitude of helpless anger faced with brute force.
Movie lovers who remember Penn from his heyday -- during the '60s and '70s, when he made edgy American classics like "Bonnie and Clyde," "The Miracle Worker" and "Little Big Man" -- can rejoice in the fact that "Inside" represents a near complete return to form for this superb director. His cast (Eric Stoltz, Nigel Hawthorne and Louis Gossett Jr.) is brilliant. His touch is unerring. Stagg's script is strong and humane. The movie has a sure, shattering control and a grip that never relaxes.
"Inside" takes place in the 1980s during apartheid and now, after its dismantling. It's about the progressive torture of a young white South African college professor named Marty Strydom (Stoltz) by a sadistic Afrikaaner colonel named Kruger (Hawthorne) -- and about the nameless black Questioner (Gossett) who, years later, interrogates the colonel in the same cell block.
The Questioner seems to know everything that happened: the colonel's slow stripping of Strydom's defenses, his slashing psychological games and his steady goading of the young man toward a crackup. But Kruger, whose quizzical smiles suggest both warm depravity and an icy disregard for human feeling, refuses to crack when the tables are turned.
Kruger hates Strydom because Strydom is from the South African elite -- with a warrior grandfather and a wealthy father -- while Kruger comes from poverty. He despises the young man for his privileges, grace and subversive attitudes, hates him probably even more than the black prisoners on whom his torture techniques have been whetted.
And the Questioner hates Kruger because, like some avenging angel, he knows exactly what Kruger has done to Strydom and hundreds of others during the bloody career he now hides.
Midway through the film, Penn and Stagg begin cutting between South Africa before and after. And the double strands -- a mock inquisition intended to demoralize a prisoner and a real investigation intended to unmask a killer -- twist together to generate a racking tension.
The movie keeps pulling us inside and out, showing us prisoners who eventually become jailers and jailers who become jailbirds.
As Penn and cinematographer Jan Weincke keep shifting angles -- showing the cell block through peepholes or in close murderous quarters -- they create a mix of anxiety and exhilaration.
As we watch these dizzying reversals, moving back and forth across the boundaries, a moral giddiness begins to spread. This, the movie suggests, is the true horror of political imprisonment: the madness that shackles minds even more than the official torture flays the flesh.
Stoltz lost a chance for Michael J. Fox-level stardom when Fox replaced him in the first "Back From the Future" after shooting began. But "Inside" shows again what a subtle, smart actor he has become, how effortlessly he can arouse an audience's sympathy.
Gossett, in a performance of unshakable sincerity and seething bitterness, gives the movie its almost apocalyptic sense of outrage.
Hawthorne came to movie stardom late in life, when he re-created his stage part in 1994's "The Madness of King George." His rapt, gargoylish face sometimes suggests Ralph Richardson in his dotty older parts, but Hawthorne's comic style is also daringly big and unabashed: barely, it seems, toned down for the camera.
He's great at eccentrics and madmen -- as with his cracked, swaggering Malvolio in "Twelfth Night" -- and Col. Kruger is a part and man he seems to understand perfectly. Hawthorne was raised in South Africa, and he makes Kruger believable and human without giving him a drop of false sympathy or ever letting him, and the audience, off the hook. It's a great performance, a thoroughly convincing monster.
"Inside" was shot in Johannesburg with a largely South African crew; production designer David Barkham was once imprisoned in a cell block very like the one he re-creates here.
Stagg, who lived there too during part of the 1980s, summons up a believable sense of chaos and the dark, fear and loathing. His writing is taut, sad, true.
But it's the acting that makes the movie, guided along by Penn's sure and sensitive hand. Ingeniously, he begins "Inside" with long street scenes, so that when the imprisonment begins, we can feel its suffocating grip and the yearning to escape. Then, moving inside the jail, he turns the movie into grand theater on a blood-stained stage.
Where Penn's best film, "Bonnie and Clyde," was about child's play on the lip of an inferno, this one is about adults who dive into hell, knowing nothing but flames all their lives.
Though it was originally made for cable TV, "Inside" doesn't look cheap or rushed. The film shows a fine writer, brilliant cast and great director, working with material that inspires and elevates them.
And though this tale is excruciating and cruel, gruesome and appalling, it has the purifying blast of a private truth, wrenched outside from the dark.
"INSIDE" * * * 1/2
