Alicia Keys eyes the Edun collection. (PMc)

It’s not every day that you discover a makeshift organic fruit and cider farmer’s market stand outside a fashion show. But that’s precisely what had been constructed outside Skylight at Moynihan Station at EDUN’s spring 2013 runway presentation this past Saturday afternoon. Breezy Hill Orchards of Staatsburg, New York was stocked with the dozens of varietals of pears and apples freshly picked. Before the show, sweaty fashion editors, stylists and buyers could take a refreshing sip of apple cider. It was a smart pairing considering that Edun, which was founded by Ali Hewson and U2’s Bono, works with African manufacturers to give them an economic boost. Naturally the majority of attendees beelined it to their seats, but The Observer gulped down a bottle before the show.

Seating was a bit frenzied and the arrival of songstress Alicia Keys didn’t help, but eventually we took in the Mali and safari-chic theme of Edun creative director Sharon Wauchob’s collection, with etched florals, mud-dyed cotton and silk and military accents.

"At Edun we believe that real style has substance. We founded the company to bring trade to Africa,” explained Ms. Hewson. “This season we are proud to say we are on track to reach our goal of producing 40 percent of the collection in Africa."

Commerce-for-developing-nations-mission accomplished.

"We [EDUN] loved the idea of working with an organic farmer's market stand. We wanted to do it last season, but the weather was so harsh the day of our show!” Ms. Hewson told The Observer afterward.

“September is the perfect time to enjoy the fruits of our surrounding farming community and of course, in EDUN, apples are close to our hearts.”

To The Observer’s chagrin, once it became apparent that everything at the farm stand was gratis, the crowd dove like hawks attacking prey. Grabbing bags of apples and even scarfing down homemade doughnuts. It’s a rare sighting to behold the fashion frenzy nibble even raw almonds or a Fiber One bar, but doughnuts? Impressive!

"If the world was ending, I would head straight for Peter Godwin," said André Bishop, the artistic director at Lincoln Center Theater.

Mr. Bishop recalled an episode during a holiday in Mexico when the car he was in with Mr. Godwin "either caught on fire or wouldn't start or both." Mr. Godwin not only put out the flames but fixed the car, found a gas station and drove everybody home. "He's very knowledgeable about how to cope with life," said Mr. Bishop.

"He has delivered lots of babies," said Mr. Godwin's wife, Joanna Coles, the editor of Marie Claire. She remembered the difficult delivery of their first son in 1999, when Mr. Godwin helped the doctor assemble an urgently needed instrument. "It was like a piece of Ikea flat-pack furniture," she said. "Peter just sized up the situation, grabbed the instructions and immediately assembled it."

"Thank God he's here," she thought at the time.

It makes sense, then, that when Peter Godwin applied for a coveted O-1 Visa ("For Individuals with Extraordinary Abilities or Achievement"), the U.S. government granted it, especially once the F.B.I. determined he was not, at the end of the day, the person responsible for mailing anthrax to midtown Manhattan. (He was briefly under suspicion after he interviewed the primary suspect for a potential New Yorker story.)

As he has become the foremost chronicler of the violence and disappointment of postcolonial Zimbabwe, Mr. Godwin's native country has been far less encouraging. A few years ago, when Mr. Godwin tried to renew his Zimbabwean passport in Washington, D.C., a consular officer told him, "Keep it and pray for better days."

Mr. Godwin recounted this story seated on a stool in a Tribeca loft that is not his permanent residence. He, Ms. Coles and their two sons are occupying the space while their Riverside Drive apartment serves as the set for a television show. When Mr. Godwin is not working on his latest project, a screen adaptation of When a Crocodile Eats the Sun--his 2007 memoir about the ruthlessness of Robert Mugabe's dictatorship and his own discovery, in his 40s, that his father was a Polish Jew and his grandmother had died in the Holocaust--he worries about what their portly tabby cat might do to the furniture here. (He's also working on a screenplay for a horror movie set in Africa.)

"It helps cover school fees," he said of the temporary arrangement. He unloaded a case of white wine into the fridge to chill for a dinner party. He wore a cotton plaid shirt and, aside from a head of gray hair, looked very young for his 53 years. A friendship bracelet was tied around his right wrist. 

Mr. Godwin resists any attempt to separate his journalistic documentation of his native country with the glossy life he lives in Manhattan. "That's how messy life is, actually," he said, adding that his ability to write about Zimbabwe was enabled rather than hindered by his exile. He was first kicked out of Zimbabwe in the 1980s, after reporting on the massacres Mr. Mugabe was propagating against his political opponents. He has returned periodically ever since.

In Manhattan, he is known as one-half of a literary power couple who host the kind of parties that are, as his friend Kurt Andersen, the author and radio host, put it, "kind of the dream idea you have as a kid of what New York dinner parties are like." But, Mr. Andersen added as an afterthought, "It seems like they're constantly renting out their apartment for movie shoots."

Ms. Coles is a prominent member of the club of brassy British expats who have ascended the mastheads of New York's magazines. Their marriage unites what Mr. Godwin in his book describes as "couture versus torture" and in person more succinctly summarized as a "headfuck." But hearing them recount the history of their relationship is sort of like watching a montage of scenes from a bad romantic comedy whose clichés one secretly hates oneself for enjoying: There's the safari that Ms. Coles spends oblivious of the elephants, absorbed instead in a copy of The Bonfire of the Vanities. There's Mr. Godwin's habit of checking hotel rooms for evidence of bugging, even if it's a Four Seasons in Milan. There's the first vacation they took together, to Sri Lanka, where Mr. Godwin made Ms. Coles dine with the prime minister after hearing that headless bodies had washed up on the beach, and the romantic weekend holiday at Shelley's cottage, where Mr. Godwin, as if struck by lightning, decided to ensconce himself to write the first 25,000 words of his memoir.

In 2007, perhaps in revenge, Ms. Coles took him to the designer Valentino's birthday party. At the behest of Valentino's publicist, the couple had to avoid any mention of the Iraq war because, as Ms. Coles put it, Mr. Valentino had not heard about it. ("Peter immediately said, 'Well, doesn't he read the newspaper?'" remembered Ms. Coles. "The man said no, 'Mr. Valentino is a man who lives in a world of great beauty and who produces things of great beauty.'")

Introduced through journalist circles in London, the couple emigrated to America in 1997, when Ms. Coles became the American correspondent for The Guardian and Mr. Godwin was riding the success of Mukiwa and attempting to write a novel he never published. (He is, it turns out, mortal.) Upon their arrival, to ensure maximum integration, they initiated a policy they called "Operation America."

"For six months, we refused to see Brits or talk to Brits," said Ms. Coles. When British people come to America, she said, "they become professional Brits and use strange British words that even British people don't use."

"After six months, we went to a party that Vicky Ward was having, and we thought, 'Oh my God! We love Brits, we love Brits!'" From then on, they allowed themselves one British encounter per month.

They married in 2001, when Ms. Coles was pregnant with their second child. It was a lunch hour ceremony in City Hall, and their clerk's accent was such that neither one could understand the proceedings. "We probably just got a zoning variance for our apartment," said Mr. Godwin to Ms. Coles before they returned to their respective offices.

Once established in Manhattan, Mr. Godwin followed the storied path of successful mid-list authors: He abandoned the novel; he acquired Andrew Wylie as an agent; then he saw a bidding war and a significant advance for Crocodile; and lastly he signed a contract with Vanity Fair.

The white-person-in-Africa memoir is generally fraught territory, mostly because even well-earned self-pity can be trying for readers, given the history of white people in Africa. As Ellah Allfrey, deputy editor at Granta in London, pointed out, "As a black Zimbabwean, part of me is forever disconnected from them. It's a world of people who can leave and that's the end of it." But Ms. Allfrey, who commissioned Mr. Godwin to write the introduction to a Penguin reissue of Dambudzo Marechera's The House of Hunger, added that Mr. Godwin has managed to transcend the potential blinkers of his upbringing.

"I think because his primary concern isn't what the white population has lost, it's what the country has lost as a whole," she said.

Others are more critical. "He's been an important influence on a number of levels, but I can't say I look forward to his next book," said Sean Christie, a Zimbabwean journalist in South Africa. "At the moment he's a fly-in, fly-out Solzhenitsyn, and his dramatizations of events have begun to feel compensatory."

As millions of Zimbabweans have left, however, the experience of Zimbabwean exiles is no longer coded white. Of the three books that make up his memoiristic writing about Zimbabwe, Mr. Godwin's new book, The Fear, is the least burdened with the
past. It's the most urgent of his works, and documents a situation that, unlike the plight of Zimbabwe's white farmers, has previously been told in only a piecemeal fashion. When assembled into long-form narrative, the story of Mr. Mugabe's pursuit and torture of everyday members of the Movement for Democratic Change, Zimbabwe's opposition party, is horrific. (Imagine if the friendly members of your neighborhood block association suddenly began turning up at hospitals and morgues after having been kidnapped in the night and beaten to the point of disability or death.) And yet it's precisely because Mr. Mugabe's postelection crackdown hit a peaceful section of civil society, because violence was not met with violence and because the terror was enough to keep the foreign correspondents away but not explosive enough to attract the preening flak-jacket types that the story went all but unreported here.

Or maybe it's just that nobody does it as well as Peter Godwin.

ewitt@observer.com

It all began 42 years ago, in 1964, with a British TV program from Granada Television, a World in Action special directed by Paul Almond and researched by Mr. Apted. A diverse group of 7-year-olds from all over England were interviewed about their lives, hopes and dreams for the future. The series was inspired by the Jesuit maxim, “Give me the child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.” Mr. Apted took over the series from there, and he has dutifully given us seven-year progress reports on the original subjects. His latest entry in the ledger of life, 49 Up, is being released in 2006, after a showing at this year’s New York Film Festival. Mr. Apted was 23 when the first of the programs, Seven Up, was shown; he is now, inexorably, 65.

In the interim, he has managed a prodigiously productive career in mainstream movies along with his continuing involvement in television documentaries, made-for-TV play adaptations and fiction films, and even TV commercials well into the age of cable and DVD. Among his more familiar credits are The Triple Echo (1972), Stardust (1974), Agatha (1979), Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), Gorillas in the Mist (1988), Blink (1994), Nell (1994), The World Is Not Enough (1999), Enigma (2001) and Enough (2002). He has won every award there is, particularly with Coal Miner’s Daughter and Gorillas in the Mist. Like one of his subjects in the Up series, Mr. Apted has moved to America and apparently settled there.

If I seem unusually tentative about Mr. Apted, it is because I, too, have aged 42 years since I first saw Seven Up, which has taken me from 36 to 78, which I don’t like to think about. Curiously, I find that the passage of time and the huge impact of the Up series overall has made Mr. Apted’s standing as an auteur foggier in my mind than ever.

But I am not alone in my indecisiveness. The renowned film historian, David Thomson, normally amply endowed with judgmental certitude, has virtually thrown up his hands over Mr. Apted’s extraordinary productivity, versatility and ubiquity, especially in the following passage from his invaluable and monumental The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: “Apted is not just an Englishman who has made an unusual commitment to American regionalism. He was born eight days before I was, and only fifty miles away—so I try to keep up with him. But since his interests are so varied, and his personality so fleeting, this is no easy task. We have only to note that in 1998, he put together the latest installment in his survey of a group of English lives and the latest James Bond movie with equal fairness, never letting one part of his mind judge the other.”

Over the years, the very consciously contrived class divisions in the Up group have struck me in contrastingly different ways. At 7, all children are supposed to be endearingly cute, but the upper-class boys in Mr. Apted’s study came across as such complacent twits that the lower- and middle-class children seemed much more likeably “natural” and “spontaneous.” But as time went on, in 14 Up and 21 Up, the upper-class kids grew up to become more interesting—and certainly better spoken—than their poorer and less-educated contemporaries.

At the time, I recalled George Orwell’s observation that the lower-class British soldiers in World War I looked 10 years older than their upper-class comrades. But by the time Mr. Apted started his research, several Labor Party governments had improved the school diets of the poorer children. Hence, the physical differences between classes were not as pronounced as the cultural differences.

One has to wonder how much the Up series itself changed the lives of its participants. They mostly turned out fairly well: Most got married at one time or another and had children, though with a strange preponderance of sons over daughters. Most seemed to have moved great distances from where they began, one all the way to Australia and another to America. There were several divorces and remarriages. None of the childhood subjects turned out to be gay. None turned to any form of crime. One or two chose to drop out along the way, though one returned at 49 after having opted out of the two previous sessions.

Still, one cannot imagine media-savvy children of the present time, either in England or the United States, undertaking such an experiment without maneuvering to become big stars—or, better still, big “idols”—in the process. Then too, the criteria for selection would provoke endless debates over alleged ethnic, racial and religious discrimination. And the mere suggestion that we live in a society controlled by class divisions and distinctions would enrage many in both England and America.

In any event, one cannot imagine any filmmaker in England or America with the ability, temperament or sheer endurance to make what amounts to a lifelong commitment to tracking the lives of comparative strangers. Indeed, it is hard to imagine anyone anywhere these days with Mr. Apted’s almost miraculous ability to listen understandingly to angry and aggrieved speakers over the direction that their life’s story is taking.

One wonders also how many of us could bear to hear our words spoken at age 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42 and 49 thrown back at us on the big screen to mock us before the world. Bruce was just 7 when he said he wanted to be a missionary so he could work in Africa and “teach people who are not civilized to be, more or less, good.”

After graduating from Oxford, Bruce did manage to teach in Bangladesh. Indeed, it is interesting how many of the Seven Up children would end up in one form of teaching or another, as if there was an unspoken agreement among them to give something back to the community—in many instances, the East End of London.

The least successful and most pathetic of the Seven Up children was clearly Neil, who seemed happy enough at 7 and 14, but was shown wandering lonely and homeless at 28. One feared the worst for him, but at 42 he was rediscovered—seemingly still penniless—working as a Liberal Democrat councilman in Hackney. He never seems to have married, and we never learn how he managed to survive through all the lean years. For that matter, Mr. Apted has never penetrated the deepest and most fearsome secret of modern times: how much money we make, and how many tokens of material success do we have? We see the external signs of wealth and achievement—houses, furniture, clothes, leisure-time activities, vacations, etc.—but no hard figures on assets and liabilities, income and debts, or inheritances either actual and potential.

In Seven Up, Lynn said she wanted to work in Woolworth’s, but she actually began working in a library at 12, and at 42 Up she was still there after 30 years. In 49 Up, Lynn reports the heartbreaking news that her post as a children’s librarian is soon to be abolished. So even when people devote their lives to helping—in Lynn’s case, with severely handicapped children—the powers-that-be can decree otherwise. On the other hand, even the children who sounded like upper-class twits at 7 revealed powerful charitable impulses as they became older.

One of the most amusingly revelatory episodes involves one of the less-privileged children, who fails to achieve his career goal of becoming a jockey and becomes a cabdriver instead. Along with his cabdriver wife, he manages to make enough money to afford a second home on the Spanish coast, in a community where there is a greater concentration of his fellow Englishmen than can currently be found in his old London East End neighborhood—which like everywhere else, keeps changing amid all the global turmoil.

All in all, 49 Up is a must-see entertainment as well as a wondrous history of the turbulent times we have lived through over the past 42 years. Yet what admittedly began for Mr. Apted as a savage critique of the English class system has gradually evolved into a breath-taking existential epic, which reminds us poetically that we make the journey through life only once, and every moment and memory of it is infinitely precious. I do not know Mr. Apted, but when I hear the sound of his voice gently asking one of his most aggrieved subjects what she wants him to ask her about her life, I recognize in his voice the sound of an artist whose strongest bond with his subject is one of love.

Maggiebaby

Laurie Collyer’s Sherrybaby, from her own screenplay, has gone the full Sundance route from workshop to the recruiting of a “name” lead, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and from there to catchpenny financing, unobtrusive location shooting in New Jersey, and a limited release to the usual art-film theaters in the usual big cities. What has emerged is a very serviceable and plausible vehicle for one of the most charismatic actresses in the industry—if one can describe independent filmmaking as an industry these days rather than a desperate crapshoot teetering on the edge between very limited success and utter oblivion.

Ms. Collyer described the inspiration for her film thusly: “One of my closest childhood friends went to prison the year I graduated from college. I based the story of Sherrybaby on her life. We used to party together in junior high and high school, and I always looked up to her as someone who didn’t take shit from anybody. I think I became obsessed with her story because in the back of my mind I knew that it could have been me going down that path. Two other kids from my block died in their mid-30’s from heroin; between them was also one little girl left behind.”

Ms. Collyer has dedicated Sherrybaby to “Sue,” her prison-bound, heroin-addicted friend from high school. And Ms. Gyllenhaal has researched the role down to the bleach-and-dye jobs that her character, Sherry Swanson, gets in a vain attempt to adapt successfully to life on parole and regain the love of her little girl, Alexis (Ryan Simpkins), who is now in the loving care of Sherry’s brother Bobby (Brad William Henke) and his possessive wife, Lynette, who has no children of her own and thus has fastened on Alexis as her surrogate child. Sherry has other problems as well, including with her suspicious parole officer Hernandez (Giancarlo Esposito), as well as the sheer impossibility of finding a well-paying job with her prison record. Sherry’s very limited final triumph is her realization that she cannot satisfy her emotional goals all at once, but must take them one step at a time. Even her permanent reunion with Alexis must be deferred until she can provide for her both emotionally and financially.

Ms. Gyllenhaal projects an uninhibited sensuality, yet not without a restraining core of pragmatic intelligence. The light that comes into her eyes as she decides at long last not to be an accomplice in her own destruction is alone worth the price of admission. As an actress, Ms. Gyllenhaal seems to steer clear of any parts that seek to exploit an audience’s weakness for conventionally happy endings. Her films are therefore always worth seeing.

Much of the movie is photographed and directed in an expressionistic crack-cocaine-like haze, with many abrupt close-ups and out-of-focus flash shots. The narrative’s major relationship involves Dan and one of his female students, Drey (Shareeka Epps), who discovers him one day smoking a crack pipe in a stall in the girls’ bathroom. It’s not exactly meeting cute, but it’s a fitting enough confirmation of the neighborhood’s depressed passivity toward all forms of lawless behavior.

Yet the major characters are marvelously gentle and subtle in their interactions, particularly Dan and Drey, who provide a steady stream of exquisite expressions, thanks to the enormous talents of Mr. Gosling and Ms. Epps, and the natural-sounding dialogue produced by Mr. Fleck and Ms. Boden, who are live-in partners as well as a writing team. To establish the contrasting social backgrounds of Dan and Drey, we are given brief introductions to their moderately supportive but mostly distracted families—without exaggerating the roles they play in motivating the uncanny rapport between the two.

There are many opportunities for the film to overestimate the power of good intentions—especially given Dan’s determination to protect Drey, a task that would seem to demand more from him in terms of character and discipline than are likely to be found in a confirmed crack addict—but this is a mistake that the filmmakers scrupulously avoid. In fact, there was a misleading scene in the film’s trailer that ostensibly pitted Dan against a drug dealer named Frank (Anthony Mackie), a close friend of Drey’s imprisoned older brother, also a dealer. In the bit used in the trailer, Dan is shown warning Frank to stay away from Drey in no uncertain terms. Indeed, the level of hysteria unleashed by Dan suggests that a violent collision between the two men is virtually inevitable. As it turns out, it’s nothing of the sort: When Frank smoothly offers Dan a drink while they talk over the situation, Dan’s good intentions crumble in his crack-weakened condition, and he accepts Frank’s offer and his own capitulation. This is a wonderfully perceptive scene that could easily have degenerated into Boy Scout heroics.

The stage is set for Dan’s final humiliation when Drey, driven by her mother’s pressing need for extra money, agrees to deliver a crack package for Frank, only to discover that the needy customer is Dan himself. The traumatic explosion that ensues for the two onetime soulmates impels Drey to turn away forever from Frank and his “easy money,” and may perhaps shame Dan at long last to mend his ways in rehab and stop kidding himself that he can “handle” his addiction.

Much of the narrative is interspersed with the students’ classroom presentations as well as archival clips of prominent 60’s radicals, black and white, speaking out for revolutionary change. The longest such insertion is taken from Mario Savio’s 1964 Free Speech Movement manifesto at the University of California, Berkeley, after the students seized an administrative building on campus. A link is thereby suggested between the hopeful dawn of the student-protest movement and its disappointing sunset, with which Dan is now trying to cope.

The key to the direction of all the performances is tactful restraint and nuanced modulation. This applies not only to Mr. Gosling, Ms. Epps and Mr. Mackie, but also to Karen Chilton as Karen, Drey’s hard-working mother, and to Tina Holmes and Monique Gabriela Curnen as two of the women in Dan’s life. Much of the film was reportedly shot in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Half Nelson is an exhilaratingly ennobling experience for viewers of all races, ethnicities and classes, but I am afraid it will reach only a small, select audience that is least in need of its enlightened, progressive, morally sophisticated message.

Loathsome Leopold

The same can be said of a remarkable nonfiction historical shocker entitled King Leopold’s Ghost, advertised as “a story a king and a country [Belgium] didn’t want told.” It’s directed and produced by Pippa Scott, narrated by Don Cheadle with Alfre Woodard and James Cromwell, and based on the revelatory book by Adam Hochschild.

King Leopold’s Ghost is not a movie to be evaluated simply as a piece of cinema seeking to balance form and content. Of the form there is little to say, especially since the content is so overwhelmingly mesmerizing in its depiction of the depths to which some human beings will descend in the oppression, torture, mutilation and murder of others in the systematic pursuit of profits. Millions of people were murdered in Congo, and not because of some theocratic imperative, as in the mutual slaughter of Muslims and Hindus after India gained its independence from Britain. Nor was it simply another instance of European colonialism in Africa.

King Leopold II of Belgium (1835-1909) was in a class by himself as a colonial exploiter. He reigned as King of Belgium from 1865 to his death. He also reigned as King of the Congo Free State from 1876 to 1904, when he was forced to abdicate because the horrors of his supposedly “benevolent” rule could no longer be hidden or suppressed. But he didn’t abandon Congo empty-handed: He sold his holdings in the colony to the Belgium nation for what might be described as a princely sum, if not an outright swindle of the Belgian people. The monuments to Leopold’s greed can be seen today in many parts of Belgium and the French Riviera. Indeed, the thriving port city of Antwerp was built virtually on the backs of the wretched Congolese laborers engaged in the labor-intensive industries of mining, harvesting and hunting for gold, diamonds, rubber and ivory, among many other valuable commodities. In more recent times, Congo has become one of the chief sources of uranium for the world’s nuclear generators and arsenals. That is the ultimate horror of the film: that not much has changed since Leopold II began his artfully capitalist manipulations over a century ago. In the end, he is almost a comic figure in what has turned out to be an unending horror-movie nightmare of prodigious proportions.

Among the more fascinating footnotes to this saga of evildoing is the derogation, even destruction, of the legend of British journalist, explorer and self-glorifier Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), best known in the popular mind for his expedition into Africa in search of David Livingstone, whom he greeted with the words “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” in 1871. I still remember Henry King’s 1939 Stanley and Livingstone, in which Spencer Tracy as Stanley asks the famous question of Cedric Hardwicke. It turns out that Stanley had a more shameful mission in Africa, serving as Leopold’s advance bullyboy to intimidate the natives and hunt elephants for their valuable ivory. In essence, the time-honored Stanley was an imperial thug for Leopold II, and the Congolese people felt the lash of his whip, both real and metaphorical.

A more edifying footnote involves the immortal Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), whose experiences as a steamboat captain in Congo provided him with the background material for The Heart of Darkness (1899). When Marlow, the narrator of Conrad’s tale, journeys up the river in search of the madman Kurtz, he finds him hallucinating to the refrain of “the horror, the horror”—Conrad’s elegant summation of what he himself had found in Leopold’s tormented realm. Ironically, Leopold himself never set foot in Congo, though his massive footprints in the region are still visible today in the poverty and suffering of the Congolese people, who have never benefited from the exploitation of the region’s vast resources.

The U.S. government and many of the largest American corporations have collaborated with the Belgian colonialists and their own military and corporate sponsors to keep the people of the region from shaping their own destinies. During the period of the Cold War, President Eisenhower and the C.I.A. conspired with the Belgian military to have nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba arrested and murdered by a military thug named Mobuto Sese Seko, who continued the looting of Congo in the name of the anti-Communist crusade—an ideological dodge that Leopold himself would certainly have appreciated if only he’d been around to see it. King Leopold’s Ghost can be recommended as an economical education in one of the lesser-known atrocities of the capitalist system, as well as an eye-opening account of history’s most ruthless amasser of wealth. The people down at Wall Street should erect a statue to the larcenous Leopold: Why should Belgium and the French Riviera have all his monuments?

Hole in the Head

Géla Babluani’s 13 (Tzameti), from his own screenplay, is the most pointedly and profoundly nihilistic film that one is ever likely to see; in fact, I have never encountered another film that is as ingeniously and insidiously hopeless. Because word has somehow gotten out that a horrifyingly straight-faced enactment of a singularly homicidal form of Russian roulette constitutes the dramatic essence of the film, people have asked me if these scenes are as shocking as the Russian-roulette scenes in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978). All I can say is that 13 makes The Deer Hunter seem about as harrowing as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (though that’s pretty harrowing too, when you think about it).

But the point is that 13 depressed me immeasurably, even though I refused to believe any of it. This is to say that I would never recommend it to anyone—but if you’re made of sterner stuff than this admittedly tender-hearted reviewer, then read no further, because I don’t think that I can say very much more about this film without revealing the gruesome climax of its Grand Guignol narrative. In fact, one reviewer complained that even the trailer for 13 gave the plot away completely and thereby spoiled the “fun” for people who hadn’t seen it yet.

To begin with, the title of the film simply refers to the number assigned to 20-year-old Sébastian (played by George Sabluani, the writer-director’s brother) to wear on his uniform in a massive game of Russian roulette, in which each player aims at the head of the person standing in front of him.

How did Sébastian get involved in this game, and why is he playing it? This is a long and not entirely clear story that doesn’t bear retelling: Suffice it to say that he is a Georgian immigrant who mistakenly thought that he could make some easy money at this “job,” which he has tricked his way into and from which he cannot now escape. In the first round, each player places one bullet in his revolver and spins the cylinder; then, on the command, they all pull their triggers in unison. After a few of the bullets have hit their mark and the bodies have been dragged away, the survivors put in a second bullet, and so on, until there are only two survivors left, each of whom aims at the other with four bullets in his weapon. Large sums of money are being bet on these illegal contests by wealthy lawbreakers. In the end, only Sébastian is left alive, and after collecting his winnings, he still has to figure out how he can stay alive. Get the picture? I didn’t.

What could possibly have confused people about the difference between description and outright dissent?

—Interview with Celia Farber, Dec 1, 2005, The Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients.

—March 19, 2004, New York Post, "Straight AIDS Myth Shattered."

—Nov 4, 2001, New York Post, on the publication of Rian Milan's "AIDS in Africa: In Search of the Truth" in Rolling Stone.

—Celia Farber, 1998, Mothering, "AZT Roulette."

Which thought-based group, exactly, was the target of a widely mailed flyer, colored in the green, yellow, and red associated with Africa, that was headed by the words "Join African-Americans for Bloomberg Today"?

The cover of the 8.5 by 11 inch piece shows Mike amid a group of black people, including public-workers' chief Lillian Roberts; inside are two pages of an African-American slanted take on Mike's record, stressing, for example, "improving the relationship between the police and our community," improving minority test scores, and "aid[ing] minority-owned businesses in bidding on City contracts."

The back features testimonials from Calvin Butts, Floyd Flake, and A.R. Bernard.

With the tag line "More Opportunity for Our Community," the piece was mailed to an, er, black-thinking family in my Brooklyn building.

At The Constant Gardener premiere, Rachel Weisz arrived in a backless teal gown by Narcisco Rodriguez and Cartier earrings. She was followed closely by a handler who let the young journos know that they were to ask only about the movie "or else we're moving on." So no one dared to ask about Ms. Weisz's upcoming nuptials.

But they did ask about Africa. According to Ms. Weisz, while filming The Constant Gardener in Kenya, they lived in tents close to the shanty towns. The Kenyan children would always run right up to the crew; she was asked by one Kenyan mother if, where she comes from, children greet adults they don't know. Ms. Weisz said, "where I come from, children don't speak to strangers."

Ms. Weisz, who runs deep elsewhere, often keeps her thoughts to herself in these settings. It is a successful tactic in her profession.

Co-star Ralph Fiennes followed Ms. Weisz; his eyes popped in a beige suit and a baby blue buttoned shirt. "I wish [America] knew that even with a severe lack of resources there is a fantastic spirit. There are real courage, dignity and joy," said Mr. Fiennes about his experience filming in Kenya. "You can feel moved by it, the simple moments of human contact—a smile, a greeting." Ah: language barriers.

The Constant Gardener follows Mr. Fiennes' character, a career British diplomat, as he researches his activist wife's death. He discovers disturbing secrets about pharmaceutical industry dealings in Africa.

The film's auteur, Fernando Meirelles, said that "there's a lot of films coming out this year about Africa. We've really forgotten about this continent." He told another reporter that his next movie will be about globalization. It will be filmed in seven countries; its working title is Intolerance: The Sequel.

The two co-presidents of Focus Features spoke to the audience before the movie started; one made mention of "our philosopher and epistemologist Donald Rumsfeld." He scoffed at Rumsfeld's assessment of the known-knowns, known-unknowns; he felt that Mr. Rumsfeld left out the unknown-knowns. "We know it, but we don't really know it," he said in regarding the troubles of Africa.

After the movie, which in some ways is a well-meaning commercial for Amnesty International and depicts the unjust lack of basic health care in Africa, the party immediately headed one block west to Compass where the entire frosted-glass enclosed room of the restaurant was devoted to tiny square desserts and icy sangria; the beverages were served with a "cheers."

Problems? Africa?

One partygoer exclaimed "this is filled with sex," as he masticated a chocolate treat topped with a blackberry and gold leafing.

There were banquets full of cold shrimp, mussels, and raw oysters. Diners fed on pasta salads, grilled chicken and mini-mushroom sandwiches.

The tuna tartar on homemade potato chips were particularly popular.

One assistant to a female celebrity said the movie "highlights a different life that no one here knows begins to exist. It presented an interesting viewpoint of third world needs, but I think we need to hear the pharmaceutical side." Err, we do? She and her friend Sarah both agreed that the movie had "beautiful saturated colors."

Dirty martinis; champagne poured with an easy hand. The party ended woozily at 1:30 a.m.
—Raegan Johnson

But there's another side to the good doctor, as was pointed out recently by Frank Rich of The New York Times . While he rarely fails to talk about his good work in Africa, Dr. Frist didn't flinch when his friend, President George W. Bush, demanded a cut of more than 50 percent in AIDS/H.I.V. funding for that continent. Also, as Mr. Rich noted, while Dr. Frist supports allowing private health plans to get a piece of the Medicare pie, he doesn't mention that he owes his wealth to a for-profit health-care company that his father and brother founded.

Dr. Frist is a smooth operator, and he tells a compelling story. But there's less than meets the eye in his earnest, self-promotional tales. For example, those operations he performed in Africa: Does this full-time politician have any business wielding a scalpel on any continent? He stopped performing heart surgery after he was elected to the Senate because such delicate work requires commitment. Apparently, some people think it's O.K. that this rusty surgeon has done hip replacements and hernia operations in Africa.

It's an open secret that Dr. Frist is running for President in 2008. In fact, he's so busy figuring out how he's going to succeed George W. Bush, it's impossible for him to do the job he should be doing now as Senate Majority Leader. Meanwhile, he continues, in Mr. Rich's words, to dispense "bromides and palliatives for every troublesome topic, dishing out the spin so smoothly that you have to question your own grasp on reality."

Indian Point: Still a Disaster Waiting to Happen

In January, a study of the Indian Point nuclear plant commissioned by Governor George Pataki and conducted by James Lee Witt, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, concluded that "emergency plans are inadequate to protect the public from a disastrous leak of radiation at the Indian Point nuclear plant in Westchester County and do not fully take into account the possibility of a terrorist attack." And now, one month later, FEMA itself-in a 500-page preliminary study-reports that the agency cannot give "reasonable assurance" that the emergency plans in place would work. After Sept. 11, the very least New Yorkers should expect is "reasonable assurance" that a nuclear plant located 35 miles from midtown Manhattan isn't a disaster waiting to happen. Instead, the evidence mounts that Indian Point and its owners, the $10 billion New Orleans–based Entergy Corporation, represent a daily threat to the lives and health of the 20 million people who live within 50 miles of the plant.

Even prior to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, there was a strong case to be made for closing Indian Point. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission identifies Indian Point as the most dangerous nuclear plant in the United States. Its record is filled with accidents, and its employees have flunked safety tests. The N.R.C. has estimated that a meltdown at Indian Point would kill 46,000 people immediately, injure 141,000 and spread radiation sickness over New York City. The current evacuation plan only concerns itself with those living within 10 miles of the plant, assuming that eight million New York City residents would just sit tight and wait for the clouds of radiation to float over the city. It doesn't take much to imagine the gridlocked roads, bridges and tunnels that would result if news of a catastrophe at Indian Point flashed across TV screens.

Now add the threat of terrorism. American soldiers found diagrams of U.S. nuclear plants in Afghan caves. Why worry about terrorists smuggling a dirty bomb into New York City when one already exists 35 miles upwind?

Entergy has made millions from Indian Point. Its chief executive, J. Wayne Leonard, and its board of directors are averse to taking the billion-dollar writedown they would have to absorb if they closed the plant. Rather than wait for Entergy to do the right thing, the N.R.C. should heed the warnings of Representatives Eliot Engel and Nita Lowey and Senator Hillary Clinton and use its authority to shut down Indian Point.

But the commission is dawdling. "The N.R.C. is acting like it's Sept. 10," Representative Engel recently told The New York Times. Governor Pataki has also failed to confront Entergy and the N.R.C. on an issue which is of vital importance to his constituency. How many more studies are needed before New Yorkers will no longer have to live in the shadow of Indian Point?

The Ivy League: Dumbbells with Great Memories

It turns out you don't have to be super smart to have a great memory-you just need to know how to use the brain you were given. Researchers from University College London compared competitors from the World Memory Championships with people who didn't have strong memory skills and found no difference in intelligence or brain structure. As published recently in Nature Neuroscience , the study asked both groups to remember a sequence of three-digit numbers. All of the participants assigned "tags," such as a color, to different items to help them remember. But the memory champions also used a technique called "method of loci," in which each item was given a place in an imaginary structure or along a familiar route. By doing so, they were activating the hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with spatial memory, and an area which presumably lies dormant in the more forgetful among us.

The research points to a flaw underlying our whole education system, which is, after all, based on students' ability to remember well-from E.R.B. scores to SAT's, college boards, MCAT's and LSAT's. Having a great memory, the new research shows, simply has no correlation to intellectual ability. Which explains why so many of the country's top universities, medical schools and law schools are filled with students who frequently just don't measure up.

In this script, there are no car chases or high-tech gadgets. All the violence takes place off-screen. (That's a different movie.) There isn't even an explosion that blows open the bank vault. But by the end of the story, trillions of dollars have disappeared from the U.S. Treasury, and the guys who heisted the money are long gone. Put in the traditional "high concept" Hollywood terms: It's The Sting meets The Grifters at the Heritage Foundation!

Like other caper movies, this one begins with assembling the team. It's a challenging and incredibly expensive process that offers some sense of the plot's scope: The movie opens with the successful seizure of the White House. In the early scenes, lobbyists and corporate executives collect a couple of hundred million dollars for the war chest of the most expensive Presidential campaign in history. But that's chicken feed compared with the eventual pay-off.

Their front man is George (Dubya) Bush, a smooth, playful guy with a down-home drawl. The closest advisers in his crew-sometimes whispered to be the real brains behind his operation-are Dick (Big Time) Cheney and Karl (Boy Genius) Rove. Their backstory is that Dubya and Boy Genius took over and looted the state of Texas, leaving behind a gigantic deficit. Now they're aiming for the biggest score in history.

Dubya charms the chumps with implausible but mesmerizing patter. He tells them he can cut taxes by a trillion dollars or so, increase the defense budget, improve education, add a prescription-drug benefit to Medicare, continue to pay down the national debt-and still balance the budget.

In a long but suspenseful sequence, their plan is almost thwarted when, despite a spending advantage of almost $60 million and a lot of happy publicity, the Dubya crew narrowly loses the November 2000 election to a guy named Gore. An old consigliere to Dubya's family comes in to turn the situation around. A goon squad intimidates the vote counters in Miami. A judge appointed by Dubya's father casts the vote that gives the gang their victory. They're finally in.

With the help of Boy Genius, Dubya muscles the tax cut through Congress, at an estimated total cost of nearly $2 trillion, including increased interest on the debt. Most of that money will wind up in the pockets of Dubya's cronies in the top 1 percent.

Over the summer, the national surplus suddenly disappears. Almost nobody worries much because Dubya says this is only temporary, and he has plenty of dough to cover contingencies. Smiling confidently, he insists that the surplus will be restored by 2005 at the latest. The suckers start getting suspicious, however, especially when they hear that the budget numbers don't add up. But a horrific terrorist attack and the persistent recession give Dubya plausible excuses. "I hit the trifecta," he explains with a chuckle when asked what happened to the surplus.

In his State of the Union speech a few months later, Dubya again offers reassurance. While the numbers may look bad for the moment, he says, "our budget will run a deficit that will be small and short-lived." He says the real problem is the "axis of evil." His White House aides insist that everything will be fine very soon. The money keeps disappearing.

It's all a setup for the next stage in early 2003, when Dubya unveils a new budget with still more enormous tax cuts. He shrugs off a record deficit of $307 billion because he has something for everyone. The liberals will get hydrogen cars and AIDS assistance to Africa; the conservatives will get a defense buildup, school vouchers and a war on Iraq, with unspecified costs that may reach $200 billion.

"We will not deny, we will not ignore, we will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other Presidents and other generations," Dubya promises, to loud applause. His "boldness" is widely praised.

Meanwhile, Dubya's henchmen have designed a series of additional tax cuts and breaks for the top bracket that will continue to drain off hundreds of billions of dollars annually. What he doesn't mention is that over the 10 years projected by his own accountants, these proposals will reduce federal revenues by $1.46 trillion, emptying the Treasury and leaving millions who depend on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid with no visible means of support. Two-thirds of those costs won't occur until after 2008.

By then, of course, Dubya, Big Time and Boy Genius will have skipped town. As the credits roll, they ride off into the sunset, in their golf carts.

Now, after the five convicted of the crime have done the time, the world learns that they weren't there, didn't do it and don't know anything about it. We should be getting accustomed to this kind of news. There has been a regular tattoo of such announcements since mitochondrial DNA testing has been introduced to establish the who-was and the who-wasn'ts of rapes and other kinds of crime where blood or spit or flesh itself is an element of the evidence. Thanks to these upsetting tests, we are repeatedly reminded that half the time, the authorities don't get it right. The long arm of the law and the bony finger of justice keep tapping the wrong shoulders.

This case was, as they used to say, open and shut, or a slam dunk, as they say now. The accused confessed, and there's no evidence that the cops beat them into it, but then guilty confessions by innocent persons are hardly new in Euro-American history. Most of the thousands of women in the 16th and 17th centuries who were hanged or burned at the stake confessed to being witches when, at least by our 21st-century lights, they decidedly were not-and many of them were not tortured. The Communists, particularly in the time of Joseph Stalin, were adept at obtaining what often appeared to be genuine confessions of anti-party activity by innocent people who, thanks to their interrogators, came to believe in their own guilt. (See the novel Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler, for a soul-freezing account of how innocence comes to embrace the crimes it didn't commit.) In the coming months, we may be told how the five were induced to make their confessions.

Did they come to believe they had committed the crime? Did the police believe they had, or the D.A.'s office-or was this a question of the authorities and the larger community having an impelling need to find and punish? Were they framed-and do we truly want answers to any of these questions?

Somewhere chiseled on the front of every courthouse is the word "Justice," which, at the minimum, means we don't put people who didn't do it in jail. But what if, with the best will in the world, we can't do justice? What if, in this nation with more than a quarter of a billion inhabitants floating hither and thither, we don't have the means of doing justice? What if we just can't get the job done a quarter of the time, or a half of the time? That's no idle question. What with those mitochondrial DNA tests, new truths about ancient crimes are continually bursting out of the closed case files, as we learn again and again that the jury or the judge-or the both of them, and the appellate courts, too-got it wrong.

The real possibility exists that getting it right in the criminal courts half the time may be about as good as we're able to make it. Without factoring in such elements as bulging dockets, incompetent lawyers, fatigue, corruption, disinterest and so forth, doing justice may be beyond us. Criminal cases depend, for the most part, on snitches (or informants, if you want to dignify them) and witnesses. Snitches are famously unreliable, since they do what they do for money or get-out-of-jail cards. As for witnesses, however honest and well-disposed to do as the system needs them to do, they fail and they fail and they fail. A large percentage of us can't correctly see and accurately recall an event if it is one involving speed and violence.

Then there are crime labs and criminalists, those white-coated persons at the crime scene picking up hairs and finding blood traces. It's all very impressive, especially when you see them in action on the television cop shows, but technology is able to make only modest contributions toward catching and convicting the true perpetrator. Assuredly, fingerprinting (a 19th-century technology), photography, (another 19th-century technology) and the Internet help, but experience shows that they're a long, long way from making sure we get the right people in the right jail cells.

As the recent sniper case illustrates, all the paraphernalia of modern detective technology availed the authorities nothing. The criminal had to phone in tips on himself to the cops, and do so repeatedly, until the man or men were finally caught. Chief Moose of Maryland's Montgomery County police caught it in the neck for letting the killer or killers continue to do his/their lethal stuff, but it wasn't the chief's fault; he and his colleagues didn't have the tools. Nobody does. Remember the Unabomber? All the crime labs and all the technology and all the profilers and all the advanced electronics and all the money and all the agents of the federal government were all for naught: It was the Unabomber's brother who nailed him. So much for modern detective work.

None of this, it should be added, obtains with white-collar crime, where there is a paper trail. They can nail those babies if they are of a mind to, or they can give the suspected white-collar crooks winks, pats on the back and appointments to big-shot jobs-but that's for another time.

The police are at their best when they have a criminal underworld to operate in. In a known underworld, with its crisscrosses of gangs, associates, established paths of illicit commerce, informants, hangouts, patterned activity, identifiable people with records and comprehensible motivations, the police can sink in, be part of the scene, and therefore find the malefactors and convict them. (Excluded from the Muslim underworld, Western police have it tough in catching terrorists.) If a given malefactor is jugged for the wrong crime, in the greater scheme of things it may be but a minor injustice, since he probably committed a felony of equal or greater seriousness that he got away with. Get 'em on one thing, get 'em on another, but get 'em off the streets. Frame 'em if you have to, but keep the dayglo-orange perp line shuffling from hood to van, from van to jail, from jail to court, from court to penitentiary. Rough justice, but the only kind we have.

The system of justice depends on a system of injustice-a proposition you are not likely to hear many officials affirm. Indeed, we have an elaborate and costly apparatus, one of whose major functions is to convince us of just the opposite-to make us believe that justice is always done, save in the rare case of the five who confessed, by some mysterious miscarriage of their psychology, to what they hadn't done and went to prison for it. Our public defenders, our ACLU's, our appellate courts, our throat-clearings about the Bill of Rights, all serve to reassure us that, while we're being protected from having our throats slit as we sleep in our beds, only the guilty are being punished, and they for the crimes they actually committed. Even the cop shows on TV-the ones done in that superb style of faux realism-reinforce the conviction that ours is the best criminal-justice system in the world.

Now here's an awesome thought: Maybe it is.