A Contributed Perspective
By Dr. Jude G. Akudinobi
University of California, Santa Barbara

Ngozi Onwurah's SHOOT THE MESSENGER, from Sharon Foster's screenplay, which won the prestigious Dennis Potter Award, takes on very sensitive issues confronting inner-city Black British communities, especially gangs, crime, mental health care, employment, parental responsibilities, role models, educational underachievement among the youth, and the relationship between individual and community.

Uncompromising in their insistence on putting the issues to closer scrutiny and frank debate, both writer and director suggest that the likely outcome of inaction would be a communal, rather than individual, failure.

The foregoing are especially telling as the main character, Joe Pascale, who forfeits a high-paying job to become an inner-city teacher, embarks on a self-assigned rescue mission of the at-risk youth.

Played with finesse by David Oyelowo, the first Black actor, at age 24, to play an English king, Henry VI, with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Joe, is not a know-it-all but a conflicted character, at pains to find a more productive position with his community.

However noble the ideals of "making a difference" and his self-fashioned philosophy of "enforced education" for these youth may have been, Joe, unlike the activists and cultural nationalists who denounce him, embodies, more distinctively, certain ideals and frustrations of the larger community.

Seen this way, his subsequent mental crisis, triggered by actual and imagined acts of injustice, was not a mere dramatic ploy to, say; solicit sympathetic identification; arguably, it opens up channels through which certain bottled-up issues can bubble to the surface.

Whether one sees the issues raised as "home truths," "inconvenient truths" or adorned cliches, as some have charged, is up to the viewer.

Clearly, Onwurah and Foster, in raising these complex matters with earnest documentary touches, aim unflinchingly at stirring debate rather than lapsing into apathy, self-defensive posturing or, even, incarcerating delusion.

Joe's various wink-and-nod addresses to the camera, for instance, are clever ways, like conspiratorial asides, to draw the audience into sharing his social commentaries and innermost turmoil.

In asking whether society, culture, history, "the system," "The Man," or any combination of those, are responsible for the state of things within impoverished Black British communities, Onwurah and Foster take the position that earnest dialogue among community members, rather than evasive silence should be a more productive starting point to tackle the decidedly contentious issues simmering.

SHOOT THE MESSENGER screened as part of the African Voices series at AFI FEST 2006 presented by Audi.

Jude G. Akudinobi, Ph.D., teaches cinema in the Department of Black Studies and the Film Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.