Of the many movies that owe an existential debt to Samuel Beckett, the finest may be Waiting for Guffman, the Christopher Guest mockumentary beloved by high school theater students across the land. Though the newly streamable 2019 drama Waiting for the Barbarians is a far poorer effort, it does distinguish itself in one particular. Like Beckett’s Godot, Guffman never arrives. The barbarians, on the other hand, most certainly do.
Set in an unidentified frontier outpost (but filmed in Morocco), Waiting for the Barbarians concerns a philosophical dispute between two men of empire. The Magistrate, portrayed by Mark Rylance (Dunkirk, Bridge of Spies), is a harmless time-server, a lover of peace who settles farming disputes and hopes to merit “no more than three lines in the Imperial Gazette” upon his death. Col. Joll, played by a characteristically mannered Johnny Depp, is a visiting superior tasked with gathering intelligence on the nomadic tribes beyond the border. In the Magistrate’s view, Joll’s mission is a pointless endeavor, an “episode of hysteria” of the sort that unfolds “once in every generation, without fail, along the frontier.” For Joll, the tribes’ malevolence is a matter of faith. The barbarians plan to invade, and given a few hours alone with a barbarian prisoner, he will force the fellow to talk.
Making his English-language debut after a successful international career, Colombian director Ciro Guerra (Embrace of the Serpent) does much with the barrenness of his shooting locations, grim environments that suggest both boredom and malign possibility. Though characters regularly venture beyond the outpost’s walls, much of the movie is spent inside them, in anticipation of events that happen elsewhere. Given such a design, Guerra could hardly have cast a better lead than Rylance, whose ability to convey weary patience brings to mind a late-career Peter O’Toole. As for the picture’s other headliner, suffice it to say that, in hell, every film stars Depp, and devils torment their victims with reel upon reel of incongruous facial expressions, halting line readings, and physical gestures of exaggerated precision.
As the Magistrate and Joll harden their respective positions, other characters arrive to leaven the proceedings. Among them is officer Mandel (Robert Pattinson), a cynical torturer who will eventually set his sights on the Magistrate himself. Also present is “the Girl” (Gana Bayarsaikhan), a beautiful tribeswoman whom Joll’s soldiers have recently questioned and who has been left crippled and half-blind as a result. Caught between lust and the desire to do good, the Magistrate takes the young woman into his care, where she quickly becomes his mistress. Later, in what is clearly intended to be the film’s moral climax, the Magistrate journeys north to deliver the Girl to her people, a decision that sets in motion both his own fate and that of the outpost itself.
Though possessed in its best moments of a certain austere elegance, Waiting for the Barbarians is a case study in flawed moviemaking. By far its most damaging problem is the performance of Depp, who simply cannot play a serious role at this point in his career, but other blunders hinder Guerra’s efforts, as well. Observing, for example, Joll’s remark to the Magistrate that “patience and pressure” are “the only way to get to the truth,” even the most callow of viewers will guess instantly that the Magistrate will have his turn on the rack. Elsewhere, the problem is not obviousness but obscurity, as when a servant’s assertion that the Magistrate has made the Girl “very unhappy” corresponds to little that we have beheld on-screen.
Perhaps the film’s most surprising shortcoming is its failure to maintain a coherent ideology despite an abundance of ponderous dialogue. (“We have no enemy that I know of,” the Magistrate intones, “unless we ourselves are the enemy.”) A critique, for most of its run time, of the absurdities of colonial militarism, the movie nevertheless admits that we do have something to fear and that the barbarians are not only to be found in our mirrors. In part, this convolutedness is due to the fact that the Magistrate is nearly as unlikable as Joll and Mandel, a smug fool who wears his moral superiority like a crown. Yet the greater culprit is the film’s ending, which doesn’t just complicate but actively undermines everything that has gone before.
To get a sense of how that conclusion unfolds, imagine a peace talk interrupted by a suicide bombing. Or a COVID-19 skeptic dying of COVID-19. (The genre is popular among journalists at the moment.) Such a denouement could prompt a flurry of revised thinking, as viewers reconsider the arguments to which they have been exposed. The likelier outcome in this case, however, is that audiences will frown, scratch their heads, and change the channel.
What could have drawn actors of note to so strange a production? Presumably, one inducement was the involvement of Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, who adapted the script from his novel of the same name. Another may have been the chance to work with director Guerra, whose early films have been well received. Alas, the result of the pair’s collaboration is a picture that is mostly muddled, a well-intentioned debacle that founders on the shore of its own confusion. It isn’t the worst movie of the year by any standard. But it will deservedly vanish without a trace.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
