“Walesa: Man of Hope” screened as a part of the Chicago International Film Festival. This early review is merely an impression of the version screened.
Despite being a moving, inspirational portrait of an influential Polish activist and political figure, you will not find any orchestral score in “Walesa: Man of Hope.” No strings, no swells, no cymbal crashes and timpani designed to jerk a tear; not in this biopic. The songs that punctuate Andrezj Wajda’s film are Polish pop and punk songs, music plucked straight from the garage.
This is the music of the working man, and although hitting the beats of a standard biopic, “Walesa” keeps its head down and does a workman-like job just as its protagonist would. It’s a modest film of a simple man, but also a great one.
Lech Walesa (Robert Wieckiewicz) joined the solidarity movement in the 1970s. The Soviet Union had control over Poland, and the nation was stuck in poverty with the Communist mentality to view working class, human labor as little more than a resource. Over just a few years, Walesa became the relatable figurehead of the movement. With a big sniffer over a sly, gruff smirk, he reached the working class in ways the young, rebellious liberals could not, eventually leading city wide strikes, negotiating for the poor and winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
The film joins Walesa in the early 1970s as his first child of six is about to be born. When a riot starts outside his apartment, he takes off his wedding ring and his watch and tells his wife Danuta (Agnieszka Grochowska) to sell them if he doesn’t return. He’s arrested, interrogated and forced to sign a document that’s bound to come back to bite him.
Danuta, loving but overwhelmed by Walesa’s stubborn need to get put in jail, get fired from his job on principles and fight for everyone, is Walesa’s rock and heart of the film. She gets more time than some of the workers Walesa is fighting for (although there’s a powerful scene when Walesa visits the man of a colleague and finds him without food or a door on his home overflowing with people), and their welcoming chemistry and humor grounds the film’s ambitions.
Wajda seems to recognize that to be a man of the people is a title of near impossible proportions. It’s impossible to speak for everyone, and the movie doesn’t try. It emphasizes Walesa’s simple dedication to doing his job, and it does so by suggesting the contrast between his modest revolutionary days of getting arrested with little fanfare, to that of his more confident, smug and smarmy days as a Nobel Prize winner in an interview with a top Italian journalist.
The movie pegs him as a working class chauvinist, and Wieckiewicz earns it. He’s blunt and demanding of his principles, but he never gives an air of pretention, and when he knows a plan is bad, it’s awful, and we believe him.
Wieckiewicz fits right into the film’s spot on docu-realism and leads the film into more humorous waters when it needs some levity. But amidst a few war-torn set pieces and sit-ins, “Walesa: Man of Hope” ends in a modest, unspectacular way. It resolves Walesa’s story on practical, not melodramatic terms, and while another film would focus on the “hope” part of its title, this one is proud to stick with the man.
3 ½ stars