'IN MY COUNTRY' UNDERCUTS MESSAGE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

'IN MY COUNTRY'' is a film with great ideas - and important ones. Frustratingly, they are undermined by Hollywood plot contrivances, generally poor writing and at least one case of woeful miscasting.

John Boorman's latest political drama can't help but register powerful and significant moments. It is set in South Africa at the start of the 1996 Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings - that remarkable moment in human history when the victims and perpetrators of the brutal apartheid system confronted each other, and vengeance was not exacted. Descriptions of atrocities suffered, and the genuine guilt some of the state's torturer/murderers express, earn the tears they will surely evoke.

Screenwriter Ann Peacock's adaptation of fellow white South African Antjie Krog's semi-autobiographical book, ``Country of My Skull,'' has some shrewd additions.

Krog's stand-in character Anna Malan, the liberal Afrikaaner journalist who discovers the extent of her people's cruelty to the black majority while covering the hearings, is joined in the movie by an African-American reporter from the Washington Post.

Samuel L. Jackson's Langston Whitfield comes armed with the understandable attitude that the TRC is just another smoke screen for white people to get away with their racist crimes. But through his contentious yet gradually warming relationship with Juliette Binoche's Anna, not to mention some firm explanations from the locals about the forgiving concept of Ubuntu that inspired the TRC, Langston grows to replace anger with humanism. He also grudgingly accepts Anna's claim that she's at least as African as he is, and in key ways more so.

This is all great stuff. But its presentation is generally awful. Dialogue has a tin-eared, position-paper quality. A romance between (presumably estranged) family man Langston and married mother Anna seems arbitrary at best - and more often a sop to make the harrowing material more playable. Late-in-the-game plot revelations seem like melodramatic shortcuts unworthy of the profound subject matter.

All of the stirring location cinematography in the world can't disguise these flaws. Director of photography Seamus Deasy also shot Boorman's shimmering black-and-white masterpiece ``The General,'' and he captures South Africa's rural and urban majesty without ever turning the place into a picturesque tourist destination.

Speaking of Boorman's last great film, ``General'' star Brendan Gleeson is perfectly reprehensible (that's supposed to be a compliment) here as the worst kind of apartheid apparatchik. Jackson handles his sometimes confusing character fairly well, and Menzi Ngubane is a solid spokescharacter for the township point of view.

The big disappointment is Binoche. The French actress has an exquisite gift for expressing complex gradations of pain in the subtlest of ways. But Anna breaks down dramatically, in private and in public, and Binoche is simply not wired for such showboat emoting.

Boorman, I'm afraid, is at his best with cynical material such as ``Hope & Glory,'' ``Deliverance'' and ``Point Blank.'' There has always been something mushy about his politically well-meaning work (``The Emerald Forest,'' ``Beyond Rangoon''). He can't help it - and there's certainly nothing wrong with it - but Boorman should recognize that his artistic temperament is not geared for reconciliation.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

IN MY COUNTRY - Two and one half stars

(R: violence, language, sex)

Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Juliette Binoche, Menzi ``Ngubs'' Ngubane, Brendan Gleeson.

Director: John Boorman.

Running time: 1 hr. 44 min.

Playing: Laemmle Town Center 5, Encino; Laemmle Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Laemmle Sunset 5, West Hollywood; Laemmle Monica, Santa Monica; Magic Johnson Theaters, Baldwin Hills; Edwards South Coast Village 3, Costa Mesa.

In a nutshell: Important subject - South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission - is trivialized by melodramatic plotting and unlikely romance.

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Reporting on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings brings reporters played by Juliette Binoche and Samuel L. Jackson together in ``In My Country.''