He Named Me Malala

There are no words to car­ry the achieve­ments of Malala Yousafzai. Once could describe how she, a school­girl, stood up to the Pak­istani Tal­iban out of a belief that young women need edu­ca­tion. She was pun­ished for her brav­ery in the form of a bul­let in the fore­head in 2012. Her fam­i­ly relo­cat­ed to Eng­land for her safe­ty. One could list the world lead­ers with whom she has nego­ti­at­ed or men­tion that she won the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 17. Locat­ing the mer­it of Malala as a human, activist, thinker and film sub­ject is easy. Locat­ing the mer­it of Davis Guggenheim’s film about Malala on a jour­nal­is­tic or artis­tic basis is hard.

The film ini­tial­ly bim­bles along with warmth and charm. Guggen­heim has a clear rap­port with Malala, bring­ing out the cheeky, gig­gly side of the teenag­er, whose past-times away from the glob­al world stage include study­ing for her GCSEs and teas­ing her broth­ers. It becomes rapid­ly appar­ent that Malala’s father is both her biggest fan and biggest enabler. Con­trast­ed against the vio­lent misog­y­ny of the Tal­iban in their home­land, his sup­port­ive traits gleam with blind­ing light. It is a plea­sure to see the two togeth­er, inter­act­ing in relaxed famil­ial ways yet with sophis­ti­cat­ed polit­i­cal under­stand­ing. They are rel­a­tives and busi­ness part­ners and their busi­ness is… Wait, what is their business?

Guggen­heim is so pre­oc­cu­pied with endear­ing him­self to Malala that he shies away from going deep on either her per­son­al iden­ti­ty or polit­i­cal vision. Malala doesn’t want to give her­self up for a reveal­ing self-por­trait. She wants to pro­tect and pro­mote her char­i­ta­ble glob­al image and broad polit­i­cal con­cerns. The nar­ra­tive has all the nuance of an extend­ed char­i­ty pro­mo. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly felt when Thomas Newman’s gen­tly heart­bro­ken score is used to exag­ger­ate the hand-wring­ing emo­tion­al­i­ty of the world’s ills.

Some­one as unique as Malala would have been more apt­ly served by more dis­tinc­tive music, not to men­tion a film less defined by play­ing it safe. There are some gor­geous ani­ma­tion sequences that hint at play­ful­ness and orig­i­nal­i­ty but for the most part Guggen­heim is more in thrall to his sub­ject than to his film.