Is it too soon? No. Would it be too intrusive, painful or inconsiderate to those who survived the tsunami, or lost loved ones? Possibly. But Tsunami: The Aftermath (BBC Two; first of two parts) is a compulsive and sensitive film of rare quality and great beauty.
The director, Bharat Nalluri, captures exactly the right mood, somehow rekindling our feelings of shock and awe, while exercising restraint and understatement. As we share the experience, Nalluri leads us to inquire what ought to be done when such a disaster strikes out of the wide blue yonder. The well-researched script (by Abi Morgan), the setting on the paradise resort of Khao Lak in Thailand, and the casting are all faultless. The fictionalised drama kept me on the edge of my seat, and will doubtless win Morgan more awards.
What impresses most is the avoidance of mawkish sentiment or caricature. Hugh Bonneville, as the UK’s envoy in Thailand, is the embodiment of a gentlemanly Foreign Office apparatchik: well-bred, well-meaning, useless. Nobody trained him for this. (A report from the National Audit Office is expected to reveal failures in our evacuation strategy.)
In the face of the FO’s bureaucratic inefficiency, the brisk competence of an energetic Australian aid worker, the excellent Toni Collette, is far more effective in succouring the bereft. Tim Roth, too, is utterly convincing as the shambolic but gimlet-eyed reporter sniffing out this big story’s underlying questions, such as the fact that there was early warning of the tsunami, in a confidential report of 1996, ignored in the interest of tourism. We see the gulf between Eastern and Western responses: bodies are burned by Buddhist monks in a spirit of serene acceptance.
Meanwhile the over-taxed consul and his staff flail about, holding press conferences which take precedence over practical support for the grieving victims such as Sue (Gina McKee), who has lost her husband and whose elder son faces death, she believes, if he cannot be flown home to Britain. We must sympathise with the FO personnel: after all, what could they do? Have a sudden access of perceptivity? Acts of kindness among strangers redeem the hell of a landscape of death and loss, where most of the victims can only wait, or wander bewildered in the eerie calm after the storm. The Carters, a British couple (the very believable Chiwetel Ejiofor and Sophie Okonedo), have to comb through piles of decomposing bodies in bags in the desperate hope of finding their six-year-old daughter, days afterwards. And when they find an uncannily similar little girl in hospital, apparently orphaned, Mrs Carter instantly decides they should look after her, which — thanks to Okonedo’s superb performance — seems entirely plausible and highly endearing. As is the gulf that opens up between the couple when recriminations start: “You were looking after her! You let go of her!”
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A young Thai actor, Samrit Machielsen, plays Than, a sweet-natured boy waiter whose entire family and native village have been wiped out. Next week’s episode will expose how speedily foreign hotel developers made a land grab for the wrecked villages after the catastrophe, razing areas where bodies were buried. A truly exemplary docudrama that involves the viewer, making us care.
638 Ways to Kill Castro (Channel 4) was an eye-opener. Some of it was rather funny, such as the enumerated totals of assassination attempts authorised by a succession of US presidents (38 plots under Ike, 72 under LBJ, 184 under Nixon, 197 under Reagan etc) — a fantastic accumulation of failure and incompetence. It leaves Fidel, if he isn’t already dead, laughing all the way to the grave, as natural causes succeed where hundreds of snipers, bombers, exploding molluscs and seductive ladies with poison powders in their handbags have failed.
Through archive footage we saw how popular, even likeable, Castro has always appeared (even the New York police found him charismatic) and how accessible he was at first, interviewed by Ed Morrow in his 23rd-floor suite in the Havana Hilton. Of course Castro’s dictatorship has an appalling record of crushing dissenters — we even saw a death by firing squad, in 1960 — but the film’s most revealing asset was Peter Moore’s assiduous rounding up of the would-be assassins: octogenarian Cuban exiles living comfortably in Miami with their porcine children, all still burning with what now looks like irrational hate and vengeance, protected and encouraged by the entire Bush family.
Dubya, attempting a few words of Spanish — “Y por fin! Viva Cuba Libre!” — gurned as always like Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Newman.