Natalia Bryant has made her debut as a creative director with a short film that features a subject matter with which she’s very familiar.
The 70-second piece is called “Forever Iconic: Purple and Gold Always,” and it’s all about the worldwide impact of the Lakers — something Bryant has experienced throughout her life as the oldest daughter of one of the Lakers’ great icons, Kobe Bryant.
The film, posted online Wednesday by the Lakers, is a fast-paced tribute to the team and its fans. It features a number of celebrity cameos — Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani takes batting practice wearing a Lakers cap; current Lakers star Luka Doncic yells “Kobe!” as he shoots a towel into a hamper; fashion designer Jeff Hamilton creates a number of Lakers jackets; actor Brenda Song obsessively watches and cheers for the team on her computer; Lakers legend Magic Johnson declares, “It’s Showtime, baby!”
Mixed in are shots of regular fans paying tribute to the team in their own ways.
“This project was an amazing, collaborative environment with such creative people and we all came together to try and portray the Lakers’ impact, not only in L.A. but around the world,” Natalia Bryant said in a statement released by the Lakers. “Everyone has their own connection to the Lakers. I hope those who already love this team watch this project and remember what that pride feels like. And if you’re not a Lakers fan yet, I hope you watch this, and it makes you want to be.”
Natalia Bryant’s first short film as a creative director is “Forever Iconic: Purple and Gold Always.”
(Los Angeles Lakers)
Bryant, who graduated from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts in May, included some famous Lakers clips, such as LeBron James arguing, “It’s our ball, ain’t it?” and her father hitting a buzzer-beating shot against the Phoenix Suns during the 2006 playoffs.
“Such an honor to be apart of this project!” Bryant wrote on Instagram. “Thank you @lakers for having me join as creative director💛lakers family forever”
Lakers controlling owner and president Jeanie Buss also posted the video on Instagram.
“Cheers to the millions of fans around the world who make the Lakers the most popular team in the NBA!!” Buss wrote. “You are the best fans in the league. Congratulations and huge thanks to the amazing @nataliabryant who helped bring this film to life for her creative director debut.”
Lakers superfan Song also posted a number of photos related to the project on Instagram, including one of herself with Bryant.
There’s precisely one surprising moment in Scarlett Johansson’s feature directorial debut “Eleanor the Great,” written by Tory Kamen. It’s the impetus for the entire drama that unfolds in this film, and it feels genuinely risky — a taboo that will be hard for this film to resolve. Yet, everything that unfolds around this moment is entirely predictable.
Also unsurprising? That star June Squibb’s warm, humorous and slightly spiky performance elevates the wobbly material and tentative direction. If Johansson nails anything, it’s in allowing the 95-year-old Squibb to shine in only her second starring role (the first being last year’s action-comedy “Thelma”). For any flaws or faults of “Eleanor the Great” — and there are some — Squibb still might make you cry, even if you don’t want to.
That’s the good part about “Eleanor the Great,” which is a bit thin and treacly, despite its high-wire premise. The record-scratch startle that jump-starts the dramatic arc occurs when Eleanor (Squibb) is trying to figure out what to do with herself at a Manhattan Jewish community center after recently relocating from Florida. Her lifelong best friend and later-in-life roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar) has recently died, so Eleanor has moved in with her daughter, Lisa (Jessica Hecht), in New York City.
Harried Lisa sends Eleanor off to the JCC for a choir class, but the impulsive and feisty nonagenarian pooh-poohs the Broadway singing and instead follows a friendly face into a support group — for Holocaust survivors, she’s alarmed to discover. Yet put on the spot when they ask her to share her story of survival, Eleanor shares Bessie’s personal history of escaping a Polish concentration camp instead, with horrific details she learned from her friend over sleepless nights of tortured memories.
Eleanor’s lie could have been a small deception that played out over one afternoon, never to be spoken of again if she just ghosted the regular meeting, but there’s a wrinkle: an NYU student, Nina (Erin Kellyman), who wants to profile Eleanor for her journalism class. Eleanor initially makes the right choice, declining to participate, before making the wrong one, calling Nina and inviting her over when her own grandson doesn’t show up for Shabbat dinner. Thus begins a friendship built on a lie, and we know where this is going.
Nina and Eleanor continue their relationship beyond its journalistic origins because they’re both lonely and in mourning: Eleanor for Bessie, and Nina for her mother, also a recent loss. They both struggle to connect with their immediate families, Eleanor with terminally criticized daughter Lisa, and Nina with Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor), her TV anchor father, paralyzed with grief over the death of his wife. And so they find an unlikely friend in each other, for lunches and bat mitzvah crashing and trips to Coney Island.
Eleanor decides to have a bat mitzvah herself, claiming she never had one due to the war (the reality is that she converted for marriage), but it feels mostly like a device for a big dramatic explosion of a revelation. It also serves the purpose of justifying Eleanor’s well-intentioned deception with lessons from the Torah.
It’s hard to stomach her continued lying, which is perhaps why the script keeps her mostly out of the support group — where the comparison to the real survivors would be too much to bear — and in the confines of a friendship with a college student far removed from that reality. Johansson also makes the choice to flash back to Bessie’s recounting of her life story when Eleanor is speaking, almost as if she’s channeling her friend and her pain. The stated intent is to share Bessie’s story when she no longer can, and surprisingly, everyone accepts this, perhaps because Squibb is too endearing to stay mad at.
Johansson’s direction is serviceable if unremarkable, and one has to wonder why this particular script spoke to her. Though it is morally complex and modest in scope, it doesn’t dive deep enough into the nuance here, opting for surface-level emotions. It’s Squibb’s performance and appealing screen presence that enable this all to work — if it does. Kellyman is terrific opposite Squibb, but this unconventional friendship tale is the kind of slight human interest story that slips from your consciousness almost as soon as it has made its brief impression.
Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.
‘Eleanor the Great’
Rated: PG-13, for thematic elements, some language and suggestive references
TORONTO — In introducing the Saturday night TIFF world premiere of “Good Fortune,” his feature debut as a writer-director, comedian Aziz Ansari told the audience the three words that are scary in Hollywood right now: original theatrical comedy. But the one word that is never scary is Keanu.
Speaking from the stage of the festival’s Roy Thomson Hall, Ansari recalled that his star Keanu Reeves broke his kneecap early in production.
“I found out he broke his kneecap and I didn’t know what was going to happen,” Ansari continued, Reeves himself standing onstage just a few feet away. “It was like, ‘Oh, my God, what is Keanu going to say? Is he going to need some time off? Is he going to drop out of the movie?’”
“And you know what Keanu said?” Ansari added. “Nothing. He just kept showing up to work and never complained, not once,” Ansari said. “He worked through what surely must have been excruciating pain and delivered a hilarious, touching performance, and he is the soul of this movie.”
The film opens with Reeves standing atop L.A.’s iconic Griffith Observatory with a small pair of angel wings on his back. Reeves, in a change of pace from his recent action work in the “John Wick” movies, plays Gabriel, a low-level angel given the task of stopping people from texting and driving. That is until he sees Arj (Ansari), who is struggling to make ends meet while working both at a big-box hardware store and as a food delivery driver.
Hoping to show him the grass isn’t always greener, Gabriel switches Arj’s life with that of Jeff (Seth Rogen), an ultrarich tech investor whose days seem to largely consist of going back and forth between his sauna and his cold plunge.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Arj much prefers Jeff’s life to his own and is reluctant to switch back. The situation becomes more complicated for Gabriel as he loses his job as an angel and must learn the tribulations and joys of being human, while still trying to fix the problem with Arj and Jeff.
For all the film’s gentle humor and quietly humanist spirit, “Good Fortune” is also rife with a palpable anger at the income inequality that motivates its story, the reality that robots are replacing the work of humans and that the excesses of the few seem predicated on the deprivation of many.
Aziz Ansari, left, and Keanu Reeves in the movie “Good Fortune.”
(Eddy Chen / Lionsgate)
The day after the film’s premiere, 42-year-old Ansari is upbeat and dapper in a gray plaid coat, black turtleneck and black slacks as he sat down for an interview in Toronto to discuss the movie and all that led up to it. After the end of his Emmy-winning series “Master of None” in 2021, Ansari had begun shooting a feature called “Being Mortal” that was shut down in 2022 a few weeks into production over allegations of misconduct by its star Bill Murray. Then production of “Good Fortune,” Ansari’s pivot away from “Being Mortal,” was delayed by the Hollywood labor strikes of 2023. Seemingly at long last, Ansari’s debut opens Oct. 17.
When “Being Mortal” got shut down, did you feel like, “Am I ever going to get to make a movie?”
I didn’t feel that way. Steven Spielberg has this story of — what’s the movie he did? “1941.” That didn’t do well and he was like, just immediately throw yourself in another thing. And I really thought about that, and that’s what I did. I just immediately went into “Good Fortune.” I mean, I had a couple of days where I was like,“Oh, no” and it was also so shocking. I think your mind doesn’t process it because it’s not really sinking in that this is what’s really happening. It probably still a piece of me [in which] it hasn’t really sunk in. It was definitely disappointing, but part of me is like, this is what needed to happen. This is the movie that should be out first.
“Being Mortal,” it’s funny, but it’s heavy. The Atul Gawande book, it’s about end-of-life issues. So it’s like, “Oh, OK. It’s another heavy drama thing.” People may have just gotten pissed, like, “What’s this guy doing?” So “Good Fortune” is definitely, to me, if you like those first two seasons of “Master of None,” I feel like what you’d hope I’d do is kind of evolve that style into a feature film and raise the level of it by having Seth and Keanu and Keke [Palmer] and Sandra [Oh], and as a feature film rather than a show.
As sweet and funny as the movie is, there also is a real righteous anger behind it. Where does that come from?
I think I got it from when I was interviewing all these people about the subject matter in the film, when I was doing research to write the Arj character. That attitude seeps in there.
“It was definitely disappointing, but part of me is like, this is what needed to happen,” Ansari says of “Being Mortal,” his first attempt at directing a feature, one that ran into production troubles with its star, Bill Murray,
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
During the opening credits of the movie, you say the line“The American Dream is dead.”
But that’s a frustration a lot of people like that guy Arj feel.
But then, you are a very successful entertainer —
Oh, yeah. Me and Seth are Jeff, no question.
How do you reconcile that? Are you concerned some people might dismiss the movie out of hand for that simple reason?
If you’re writing, you have to be able to write outside your own experience — for someone who’s like Arj, who doesn’t have the platform to tell these stories. When I did “Master of None,” we did an episode called “New York, I Love You.” And there was a segment about taxi drivers, a segment about a doorman and a segment about a woman who’s deaf. And doing that episode taught me a process of interviewing people and figuring out how to get these stories right when they’re not your experience. We did an episode in Season 3 about a woman going through IVF. I’d never done that or anything, and it had never been a part of my life. But I talked to all these people, and from the feedback I got, we got it right. And that’s what I did with this.
I don’t want to spoil anything, but for a movie coming out from a Hollywood studio, Seth gives a speech at the end that is politically radical, about how rich people can’t expect to have so much without others getting angry.
It’s kind of nuts. Some of the stuff that’s in there, I’m like, “Whoa, we really got away with something here.” Some of the stuff that’s in there, and the trailer kind of hides a little bit of that stuff, I think there are people that’d be like, “Oh, s—.”
At the premiere, there was big applause for the line, “F— AI.” Is that your feeling as well?
I’d rather say that I’m pro-human. I’m pro-people.
Keanu Reeves, left, Seth Rogen and Aziz Ansari in the movie “Good Fortune.”
(Eddy Chen / Lionsgate)
The movie is very ambitious in combining the character stories and the attention to the notion of income inequality. Was it hard for you in balancing the characters and that theme? Was the work of that more when you were writing it or when you were editing what you’d shot?
It was both. And that’s the difference between a TV show and a movie. You have a different canvas. But it was a tough thing to do. And it was my first time doing it. I remember writing a second one while I was editing, and it was such a great help because you kind of see a few moves ahead. You’re like, “Oh, wait a second, I should get to this faster.” You kind of can see your mistakes a little bit in an earlier stage because you have more experience. This is another reason I really want to get into it again and start working on the next thing because I feel like I learned a lot from it.
That’s the thing that’s so interesting about doing stand-up and doing filmmaking. Stand-up, it’s so easy to “get to the gym,” right? If I really wanted to go to do stand-up tonight, I could do it. I could go find a club in Toronto and jump on a show. But If I wanted to go direct, that’s a big journey to get to the gym. So you have fewer opportunities to kind of get the reps in.
Shooting a movie is in L.A. has become such an economic and political issue for the city. Was that a consideration in making the movie in Los Angeles?
I wanted it to be in L.A., I felt like this movie had to be set in L.A. Jeff’s not going to be living in whatever place that gives you the tax credit. And L.A. really is the perfect backdrop for the story to me. And it was challenging, but you also get the benefit of working with some of the greatest technicians in the world in L.A. And I also just love being a part of the lineage of films that are set in L.A. I watched that documentary, “Los Angeles Plays itself,” and that was so fun to watch that and just see how every movie has its own L.A., whether it’s “Heat” or “Tangerine” or “Chinatown.”
And I feel like “Good Fortune” has its L.A., and it’s exciting to show some of these neighborhoods, to see people responding to seeing Eagle Rock or Los Feliz. Whenever I was writing the movie, I always thought about that taco place in Hollywood — it’s across the street from Jitlada. I always thought about that place. I thought there was something so cinematic, and it was a hard location to clear. And our guy [location manager] Jay Traynor, he made it happen. And finding Jeff’s house was so hard. But it all came together, and I loved showing Koreatown and that Gabriel works at a Korean barbecue restaurant. Just showing all these parts of L.A.
I want to be sure to ask you about working with Keanu. People are really responding to this role. And I’m having a hard time putting my finger on what that is about.
No, I’m feeling this. Even since [the premiere], I’m feeling it. I knew people would like him, but it’s hitting on another level.
Why do you think that is? What is the alchemy of Keanu in that role?
I was thinking about this when I was eating lunch. If you look at the roles he’s done that are comedic, whether it’s in “Bill & Ted” or in “Parenthood,” there’s this innocence, this sweetness and this kindness that’s in there. And then Gabriel, to me, is the progression of that. And it’s also that you have Keanu at 61, where when I first met him, I was like, “Hey, there’s something about you that people are responding to and who you are as a real person that I don’t think I’ve seen onscreen. And I think you can show some of that with Gabriel.”
It also has all of his comedy superpowers just dialed to the max. And we were just having so much fun. It just became playtime. We were coming up with bits all the time: Oh, he’s never used the internet before. Let’s just write a quick scene where he’s using the internet for the first time. What’s he gonna do? He’s gonna look at photos of baby elephants. It became such a fun joke bag. You could just make him do anything. And it was funny, the guy’s never done anything — if he takes a bite of a taco goes, “Wow!” It’s really the funniest character I’ve ever written for.
Embeth Davidtz’s home is so quiet. Nestled in Brentwood Park, the 59-year-old actor’s spacious yet cozy place feels like a sanctuary, the skylight in her kitchen offering plentiful afternoon sun. Once owned by Julie Andrews, the house is where Davidtz feels most comfortable. It’s taken most of her life to find somewhere that made her feel that way.
“I seldom leave,” she says, smiling. “I’m not someone who likes to run around. I like being here.”
She’s lived in this house for about 20 years — it’s where she and her husband raised their children, now 22 and 19. She moved to Los Angeles in 1991 and before then, hers was a completely different world. Lately, that world has rarely been far from her thoughts.
In the early 1970s, when Davidtz was eight years old, she moved from America with her South African parents to Pretoria, in the midst of that country’s apartheid system. Long wanting to come to terms with the institutional racism she witnessed during her childhood, she has done something that previously had never held much interest: write and direct a movie. Pivoting from an on-screen career of stellar, precise performances in movies like “Schindler’s List,”“Junebug” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” Davidtz has at last made a directorial debut with “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” (in theaters Friday), a gripping and somber drama based on Alexandra Fuller’s acclaimed 2001 memoir about growing up in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The film is about Fuller’s family, but it’s also very much about the lessons Davidtz never wants to stop learning herself.
“It’s a constant processing,” she says of how she is always reckoning with her past. “I think I’ll probably have to grapple with it till the day that I die — what I remember seeing.”
Davidtz, Lexi Venter and Rob Van Vuuren in the movie “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.”
(Coco Van Oppens / Sony Pictures Classics)
Set in 1980, the year that the African region known as Rhodesia, ruled by a white minority, would become the independent nation of Zimbabwe, “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” features Davidtz as Nicola, an angry, alcoholic policewoman whose privileged life crumbles as the Zimbabwean War upends the country’s racial power imbalance. However, the movie is not told from Nicola’s perspective but instead, from that of Bobo, her 8-year-old daughter (played with beguiling immediacy by newcomer Lexi Venter), who reflects Fuller’s own blinkered worldview at the time. As Bobo provides voice-over narration, we witness a disturbingly naturalized culture of colonialism in which our main character, a seemingly innocent child, bikes through town with a rifle slung on her back and parrots the racist attitudes espoused by white landowners around her.
Zimbabwe isn’t South Africa, but when Davidtz read Fuller’s stark memoir, the similarities of racial injustice were striking.
“She cuts you off at the knees,” says Davidtz. “You recognize it, then you feel shame.”
Davidtz was born in Indiana, but after some time in New Jersey, her family moved to Pretoria when she was eight. Her 17 years in South Africa left their mark. Even though she’d never written a screenplay before “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” she had been working on something about her upbringing. But after reading Fuller’s memoir, Davidtz says, “I remember thinking, ‘Well, that’s the definitive book on it. I’m never going to be able to write a book like that.’”
“I wouldn’t say mine was a happy childhood,” she continues. “I think it was very unhappy in ways. Did I love Africa? Yes. But was it an idyllic childhood? No.”
Bobo’s bigoted views — the girl has come to believe Black people don’t have last names and are secretly terrorists — weren’t what Davidtz experienced growing up. “My family didn’t act that same way, they didn’t speak that same way, but you were part of the system by being there,” she says.
Like Bobo’s family, Davidtz did not enjoy many luxuries, except in comparison to the help around her. “If you had servants in your home, you were part of the system,” she says. “[My parents] certainly were not out marching for civil rights. They fell in that gray area.”
Not that Davidtz excludes herself from the racist mindset that’s evident in Bobo, who enjoys spending time with her family’s housekeeper, Sarah (Zikhona Bali), despite treating her as beneath her. That relationship picked an emotional scab for Davidtz. “There’s uncomfortable memories that I have,” she admits. “I remember playing with [Black] children and being bossy and being just an a—hole.”
Her personal connection to “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” goes deeper. Fuller’s mother was a drinker; in Davidtz’s family, it was her father, who studied applied mathematics and physics in the States. She sees his alcoholism as the byproduct of an idealism that got crushed.
“He was a physical chemist; he was a scientist,” she says, “and his whole thought was this altruistic thing of, ‘I’m going to take everything that I’ve learned and bring it back [to South Africa].’ That’s where the alcoholism emerged. That government that was running South Africa really tightly controlled everything that my father did. I think they were highly suspicious of somebody coming from America. He very much felt his wings were clipped. And so the bottle got raised.” (These days are happier ones for her dad: “He’s medicated; he’s calmer,” she says. “He doesn’t drink anymore.”)
“This [performance] was hard and it was scary, but it was necessary,” Davidtz says of her turn in “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” as a racist farm owner in Rhodesia.
(Matt Seidel / For The Times)
Davidtz can’t quite pinpoint where her passion for performing originated. “No one else has it,” she says of her family. “I really think that 7-year-old me sat in my living room in New Jersey watching the ‘Sonny & Cher’ show. Cher with that hair was just the most glamorous, amazing thing I’d ever seen. And then, suddenly, we land in this dirty, dusty farmhouse with my dad in decline and no television.”
Davidtz escaped Pretoria — at least in her mind — by going to the movies, including an early, formative screening of “Doctor Zhivago,” David Lean’s 1965 historical romance. “My mind was blown by the sweep, the story, the epicness,” she recalls. “Maybe I wanted, somehow, to remove myself from that dirt and squalor and aspire to something.”
“Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” doesn’t contain the gratuitous violence you often see in films about racism. In its place is a codified class structure ruled by its white characters, who strongly encourage the locals to vote for approved candidates in the upcoming election in order to maintain the status quo. But once revolutionary Robert Mugabe comes to power, that old system gives way, leading to an unsettling scene in which Nicola wields a whip to keep Black Africans off what she considers to be her farm.
The questionable optics of a white woman telling a story about Zimbabwe entered Davidtz’s mind. She did her homework about the region, even though she ultimately had to shoot in South Africa because of Zimbabwe’s current political unrest. She spoke with her cinematographer, Willie Nel, about how the film had to look.
“I need the light shining through her eyes like that,” Davidtz remembers. “I want the closeup on the filthy fingernails. This is the way Peter Weir gets in super-close, how Malick [shows] skies and nature.” And she made sure to center her pessimistic coming-of-age narrative on the white characters, condemning them — including young Bobo.
“I don’t think a Black filmmaker could tell the experience of a white child,” she says. “I think only a white filmmaker could tell that. [Bobo] misunderstands a lot of what [the Black characters are] doing. That was deliberate — I tried to handle that really carefully. I’m certainly not trying to make the white child sympathetic in any way.”
She was just as adamant that Nicola be an utterly unlikable, virulent bigot. “You needed her to be diabolical in order to show what really was happening there,” says Davidtz. “I saw people behave like that.”
This isn’t the first time she’s played the villain, but she wanted to ensure there was nothing sympathetic or devilishly appealing about Nicola. Recalling her portrayal of the superficial, materialistic Mary Crawford in the 1999 adaptation of “Mansfield Park,” Davidtz observes, “She was just cheerfully going about her life — being diabolical, but with a smile. She was charming. That was more acceptable, more palatable.” She allowed none of that here, tapping into the desperation of a woman whose self-worth is wrapped up in the subjugation of those around her.
The veteran actress has often done terrific work by going small, her breakthrough coming as a Jewish maid prized by Ralph Fiennes’ sadistic Nazi in 1993’s “Schindler’s List.” More recently Davidtz has earned rave reviews in series like “Ray Donovan” and “The Morning Show.” She doesn’t do showy and she’s the same in person, appealingly modest and soft-spoken. But in “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” she gives a boldly brazen performance as Nicola, a portrait of ugly, entitled hatred. Although Davidtz felt anxious playing such a demonstratively racist character — especially around her Black cast — she also found it a refreshing change from how she usually approaches a role.
“This [performance] was hard and it was scary, but it was necessary,” she says, Getting herself to such a dark place for “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” was easy, though. The trick? “I didn’t have time,” she says. “Everything was focused on only the three hours [a day] that I had with the kid. It was like, ‘I got to get this quick,’ and I was on my last nerve, which was great for the character — I was pretty worn down by the time we shot a lot of my stuff.”
“When you’ve been in a place where things have been so wrong, you spot it really quickly in other places,” Davidtz says of injustices occurring both in America and abroad. The actor and director is photographed at home with her two rescue dogs, Parfait (front) and Zoomie.
(Matt Seidel / For The Times)
Similarly to “The Zone of Interest,” which Davidtz reveres (“I love that film,” she declares, awed), “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” illustrates the insidiousness of bigotry by stripping away the simplistic moralizing. Bobo, her parents and the other white settlers benefit from an unjust system, always presented matter-of-factly, as the adults relish their domestic bliss at the expense of the indentured locals. I ask Davidtz if she’s showing us what everyday evil looks like.
“Evil’s a strong word,” she replies. “I’d say ‘oblivious’ or ‘unconscious’ or ‘culpable.’ It’s all of the above. I really wanted to reveal something the way ‘The Zone of Interest’ revealed something. It’s the casual racism. An ordinary person watching [the film] goes, ‘Oh, my God, that was normal to them. That was their normal.’ Then you see the full picture. Then, the evil of it shows up.”
In her memoir, author Fuller writes about her later political awakening, a process Davidtz underwent as well. “I saw moments around me — horrible, violent police arresting men on the streets, the people chucked into the back of police vans,” she says. “Just that terrified feeling inside and knowing, ‘If you’re white, you’re safe. If you’re Black, you’re not.’ Then as I got older, [there was] the disconnect between what I’m seeing and what is right.”
According to Davidtz, “the scales fell off” once she attended South Africa’s liberal Rhodes University in the early 1980s and started taking part in protest marches. “I felt like that was the big awakening,” she says, “but it’s an awakening that continues.”
There is one frequent sound in the calm oasis of Davidtz’s home: the chatter of news broadcasts. “It’s often on in the background,” she says, “but I think it’s a habit that’s eroding my peace of mind.” She admits to the same conflicted feelings many in Los Angeles have, a desire to stay informed of everything that’s happening — the ongoing war in Gaza, the stories out of Ukraine, the violent ICE raids in Southern California — but not succumb to despair and anger. No amount of quiet can tune out the world, and Davidtz doesn’t want to.
“When you’ve been in a place where things have been so wrong, you spot it really quickly in other places,” she says of the injustices occurring both here and abroad. “One thing that we can do is say what we think.” Remembering her own childhood, and pondering what prompted her to make this movie, she suggests, “I think it comes from watching something silently for a long time. I think that part of me will never want to not say, ‘I don’t think this is right.’”
With “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” Davidtz is speaking up, but she knows those bad old days aren’t over. In fact, they’ve never been so present. As the film ends, Bobo takes one last look at the town and the locals that shaped her. There’s a glimmer of hope that, one day, this girl will outgrow the racism she’s ingested. But the land — and the pain — remains. Davidtz has not allowed herself to look away.
