November 13, 2003 | Read Time: 6 minutes
The latest Angelina Jolie movie — the action-romance Beyond Borders, in which she chases the handsome doctor of a humanitarian group from one desperate country to another — is a textbook example of why the benefits of getting celebrities involved with charities must be weighed carefully against the pitfalls. The film has aroused controversy among humanitarian groups for its demeaning depiction of relief organizations and the people they serve — and is especially worrisome at a time when charity workers are facing heightened security perils in Iraq and elsewhere.
Ms. Jolie is a very public philanthropist who has said that she has more than enough wealth and wants to help others, telling London’s The Sun newspaper: “I’ve taken on the responsibility of donating at least a third of what I earn to humanitarian aid.” The Internet Movie Database reports she earns plenty, including $19-million for her Lara Croft movies.
The biggest beneficiary of Ms. Jolie’s philanthropy so far has been the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, for which she acts as a goodwill ambassador, publicizing the plight of refugees around the world. The refugee agency estimates Ms. Jolie’s contributions in cash and donations of services at around $3-million so far, with six-figure profits from Beyond Borders premieres and royalties from a book compiling her refugee travel journals still to come.
But as the actress warned UNHCR before it agreed to appoint her ambassador, the twice-married Ms. Jolie attracts plenty of tabloid headlines about her sex life, tense family relationships, and much else. Regardless of the accuracy of the stories about Ms. Jolie, nonprofit groups associated with her need to be prepared to deal with the controversy she stirs up.
Beyond Borders takes these problems to a new level because it closely confuses life and art by setting a love story within the world of humanitarian aid and refugees that Ms. Jolie inhabits in her U.N. role. In the movie, she plays an American socialite turned aid worker who chases Clive Owen, playing a British doctor working for a nongovernmental organization, for a dozen years as he tends to crises around the world, from Ethiopia’s famine to Cambodia’s refugee outflow to Chechnya’s war.
Aside from fistfights and helicopter rescues infrequent in relief work yet inevitable in Hollywood, the debate provoked by Beyond Borders — a title hinting of a nonexistent link with Doctors Without Borders — offers a host of ethical and practical issues.
Unlike most relief groups, the movie’s humanitarians are not independent, impartial, or neutral, since Mr. Owen’s nonprofit group gets involved in smuggling weapons for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Given the bombings of the United Nations and Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad and other terrorist strikes aimed at humanitarian workers, this is a suggestion that, even in a work of fiction, could put charity officials at grave risk. Sandra Mitchell, the International Rescue Committee’s vice president for government relations and advocacy, said the film’s doctor was a “humanitarian cowboy,” since international-aid charities hold themselves to clear principles, guidelines, and standards, adding, “We don’t run guns.”
Beyond Borders also resurrects disaster-aid myths by showing Chechens, Cambodians, and others as either passive victims, dependent on white foreigners, or evil incompetents. Yet in sudden disasters, survivors save more lives than foreigners; in most international development and relief efforts financed by charities, indigenous staff members carry out most of the work. Why no role for a country’s Red Cross or Red Crescent Society or local organizations, such as Africa Humanitarian Action?
Other humanitarian experts are worried that the movie makes international aid efforts seem worthless and could lead the public to stop supporting relief charities. Steven Hansch, a refugee researcher at Georgetown University and an adviser in the film’s early stages, wrote to U.N. officials to protest the film, and commented in the Los Angeles Times: “Beyond Borders portrays aid work as hopeless: well-intentioned but futile, with no resulting impact, no return on investment. In reality, humanitarian aid saves tens of thousands of lives.”
Mr. Hansch and others are concerned that the United Nations appeared to endorse the film, with both Secretary General Kofi Annan and Ruud Lubbers, the High Commissioner for Refugees, attending the New York premiere. The director of Beyond Borders, Martin Campbell, told The Washington Times how the script “was sent to the U.N. for approval; portions were altered based on the organization’s input,” adding that Mr. Annan “seemed enthusiastic about it and certainly gave us the thumbs-up.”
Contacted for comment, a communications official in the Secretary General’s office insisted that all dealings with the film had gone through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, while UNHCR said that it had not offered any approval or comment, even when an early outline was sent to it as part of a request for refugee statistics. Would it have been quite so disinterested or relaxed if it had been UNHCR’s reputation at stake?
A UNHCR spokesman in Geneva said: “The whole context of humanitarian-aid workers is largely unknown to the general public. If the film gives the public a better idea of the tough challenges involved, perhaps that’s all to the good. Refugees are not the most popular group, nor are their concerns widely written about. Ms. Jolie has studied very hard to understand the complexity of these issues and bring that to the public, which is something money can’t buy. It’s a movie, it’s a Hollywood fiction, it never pretended to be a documentary. It was not a collaboration with UNHCR. It’s not even about humanitarian action; it’s a love story.”
Film distributors Paramount and Pathé did not respond to requests for comment about the negative portrayal of humanitarian organizations.
The film got bad reviews in the United States, so Beyond Borders might not do as much damage as charities fear. Commercially, the movie failed on its first weekend, when the U.S. box-office sales produced just $2-million, putting it 11th among competing titles.
Movie critics were quick to pick up on the exploitation of a serious subject like humanitarian aid. The Austin Chronicle, for example, said the film depicted the staffs of organizations like Oxfam and CARE as unsung heroes, but “in such a way as to exploit the very war-torn hellholes it uses as settings. . ..Things might have been a tad better off if all involved had scrapped this terrible film and instead donated the multimillion-dollar budget to charity.”
Nonprofit groups and aid workers are perhaps too sensitive about dramatic license when so many other institutions — from the CIA itself to the police — daily endure much worse. But the reality of humanitarian aid is not such common knowledge that the public can put fiction in context.
Ms. Jolie has admitted that many people might see a connection between the reality of war and the refugees it produces and the glamorization of violence by Hollywood: “That is the duality of things,” she told the Observer newspaper, in London. “I could not be an actor and then raise awareness. I have to try and live in both sides of the world.”
Despite Ms. Jolie’s undoubted intelligence and commitment, Beyond Borders proves the contrary: that celebrities should never mix real and fictional roles.
Nick Cater, a British journalist, is a contributor to AlertNet.org, a Web site that covers humanitarian aid, and the
Guardian newspaper’s Society Online section. He can be contacted at cateraiduk@yahoo.co.uk.
