In The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, viewers get to see a panorama, and study a people, if only for two hours, of a land seen usually only at 1,000 feet out the arced plastic window of a chopper, en route elsewhere.

The Boy, however, for all its earthy basics and utter lack of glitz, puts Black Panther exactly where it always belonged: in the firm jerkativity corner where money and production values go to hide their heads in shame.

Chiwetel Ejiofor has produced a simple but affecting story that inspires audiences much like the tale of the Jamaican bobsledders and the endlessly persistent doctor who discovered and explained the dangers of CTE, the football-related brain jury.

The Chichewa- and English-speaking sub-Saharan mostly Christian natives of the Malawi village where the story takes place – based on true events, we are told – is suffering a seasonal drought that has arrived early, consigning the crops of the protagonist (Ejiofor) and his suffering farmer neighbors to sparse or zero saleable yield.

Thieves from other villages not respecting the climatic parch and the plight of the village make the spare earnings of the villagers and the protagonist's family even more dire.  The 14-year-old son, played by the immensely credible young Joseph Marcell, is banned from school for want of full tuition.  His beautiful and practical mother could not scrape together.

Aside from the corrupt government officials arrogantly ignoring the needs of the people they swoop in to lecture, the schoolmaster is the coldest-hearted person in the village.  But the boy manages to find a way to study in the school library and read up on the turbine his village so desperately needs.

Ejiofor never loses the viewer's compassion even in his despairing rages, against his son, his unhappy fate, the Malawian government.  How the lad continues his dogged quest for a solution to the town's drought and the villagers' poverty for half the year is inspirational enough to bring tears.  The actors are unfailingly natural.  The photography is a tonic to artifice we are inured to.  Real, bleached, and parched.  A quiet jewel of a film.

THE DEATH OF STALIN

Directed by Armando Iannucci

All during the first half of this true-ish yet farcical recap of the hours and days after the death of Stalin in 1953, one could not help comparing the terror in the eyes and faces of his subalterns and aides, top men in the Politburo scared to the bone that the mustachioed dictator would come back to life, to today's North Koreans under the crazed autocrat Kim Jong-un, who kills at almost the same rate as did Comrade S. with his daily purges.

Enjoyment of this noirish dramedy is in direct proportion to how much history one has lived through or been acquainted with.  "Nicky" Khrushchev, done to a devilish hair by Steve Buscemi (scant physical resemblance, of course), is a foul-mouthed pragmatic hoot, but then, everyone in the inner circle takes liberties with scatology as all of them dither and dally trying to resolve how to help the man they all loathe but fear – then jockey viciously for position in the bureaucratic jungle that was Soviet politics then.  (And now...?)

The damnable and dastardly are represented, purged and purging, sweating and defensive.  Covering their fronts, backs, and sides.

Everyone in the Presidium (1952-1966) was foul-mouthed, if we are to believe the liberties-taking movie.  There is something in fact that evokes the Keystone Kops, the way these fat, scenery-chewing pols conduct themselves, scheming among themselves while oleaginously smiling with one of their several public faces.

Beria the beast is shown for all his imperturbable delight in carrying out the daily lists of whom to shoot, often with zero provocation.  Husbands turn against wives, call them out as "parasites" and worse, if they think Stalin might have a disinclination to the wife.  Men turn against their fathers, saving their own skins.  Women are brutally manhandled, a euphemism, then rescued, dressed up, and mascara'ed if the mood turns.

Behind much of the foreground action, the background features soldiers rounding up hysterical innocent citizens and offing them in the most dispassionate, peremptory way.  It is horrifying on many levels, as it cannot fail to evoke narratives of other pogroms and roundups.  Icy cool.

Though the text is serious, the goings-on are almost...ludicrous.  Mordant laughter, shall we say.

When the capos fret about whether they should get a doctor, because the plutocrat is still technically breathing, they can't dredge up any.  Stalin has had most effective doctors killed, in the much bruited alleged "plot."  They assemble a conga line of decrepit, over the hill, or too young to know anything "doctors" to minister.  Their lives too hang in the balance if they guess wrong.

Flecks of such dark humor are salted with the viewer's own empathic transfers of fear (if you had a father not unlike these), memories of parochial school, draconian teachers, nuns, or Nurse Ratcheds.

Liberties with the actual history are taken, but on the whole, the material displayed provides ample grist for hours of discussion, especially if you see the proceedings in a group.

Takeaway?  Plausible quasi-history with a dash of jitters, titters and mostly bitters.  Khorosho, all in all.  Spasiba, Iannucci.

Image: Kotivalo via Wikimedia Commons.