Davis Guggenheim, the director of “He Named Me Malala” obviously is flabbergasted. I just couldn’t imagine what could have happened to her. Still when I remember it is very very hard. With her father, Ziauddin, she travels the globe offering solidarity with girls and women beleaguered by repressive ideologies and regimes. That is more than enough for me in a movie. Directed by Davis Guggenheim, “He Named Me Malala” explores the life of the young activist, who was shot by the Taliban in 2012 for her advocacy of girls’ education in her native Pakistan. Certainly Malala’s story is one of the most horrifying and uplifting of recent years.
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Malala is shown at home, teasing her brothers and talking about her favorite male sports stars.
Why, we might ask, didn’t Guggenheim make more of the simple fact that Malala’s cause – universal education, regardless of gender – serves the Yousafzai family business, which has been, for generations, schooling? In the film, her father refers to the two of them as two bodies with the same soul.
One of the difficulties with Guggenheim’s portrait of Malala is the way he lets her story whirlpool to conclusion. The Islamic extremists arrived with false promises and kindness, soon began banning and burning “inappropriate” books and DVDs, then started calling out those who opposed their radical beliefs, including banning girls from attending school, and eventually escalated into all-out terrorism, killing their enemies and bombing schools. She rallied the Afghan troops to defeat the British. She soon decides to join him in publically speaking out and becomes a target. She also talks about the culture shock she has experienced in her adopted homeland, where girls her age obsess over boys and clothing in a way that is still foreign to a Muslim girl from the rural Swat Valley.
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Malala Yousafzai’s first question when she awoke from her coma was, “Where is my father?” “He didn’t make me Malala”, she quietly declares. While the film itself is plagued with structural storytelling issues that are at best emotionally numbing, at worst confounding, Malala’s inspirational spirit is undeniable. I imagined a Japanese girl in Tokyo. The 87 compact minutes of “He Named Me Malala” include a few beautifully impressionistic animated sequences that render – and soften – the subject’s childhood memories. The movie states, “When you educate a girl, it changes our world”. It is your job to get them released.’… Guggenheim occasionally roots around for something deep, but all too often is content with the ride-along “a day in the life” footage. Those efforts resulted in her winning the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize. The girl in that story is later shot and killed. This uprooting of a loving family is one of the prices Malala and her father paid for their outspokenness. She knows what is like to be a refugee. That earned her a death sentence in the eyes of the Taliban. Years after her attack, for example, she said she holds no ill feelings to the men responsible.
