Review

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind review: Chiwetel Ejiofor's Malawi famine drama has real electricity

Maxwell Simba and Chiwetel Ejiofor in The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
Maxwell Simba and Chiwetel Ejiofor in The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind Credit: netflix

Dir: Chiwetel Ejiofor. Cast: Maxwell Simba, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Aïssa Maïga, Lily Banda, Lemogang Tsipa

“Malawi is preparing for a very long hungry season”, announces a tobacco factory boss in The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, the Netflix-ready feature directing debut of Chiwetel Ejiofor. This true story is set during the country’s food crisis of 2002, when droughts ravaged the arable land, not only plunging thousands into near-starvation but reducing already meagre farming incomes to nothing.

The film takes its name from a memoir written by William Kamkwamba, 14 at the time, who was forced to drop out of school because of his family’s inability to pay the fees. It was William, played by newcomer Maxwell Simba, who then became the unlikely saviour of his whole village, by devising a dynamo out of scrap metal and using it to power a windmill, which pumped enough water out to irrigate the parched soil.

This breakthrough is long – too long – in the arrival here, tellingly given away in a trailer which opts to cut to the chase, as it were, of William’s invention, even though it occupies the last 10 minutes or so of final screen time. Not that the famine – any famine – deserves short shrift. Ejiofor’s script lays out the stakes for the Kamkwamba family, who have a young baby to support as well as a grown daughter (Lily Banda) who’s secretly in love with a local teacher.

It isn't that the Kamkwambas’ hardship, as they gradually have to ration down to a meal a day, lacks detail, but dynamism as storytelling: sagging at times, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind feels as though it might have played better as a mid-length short film, with subplots pruned back. Ejiofor, such a commanding actor with good instincts for holding himself in check, makes us impatient for the meat of this story, turning the pages too slowly, lingering too long and a bit too pictorially on beats he didn’t need.

The long-impending confrontation between father and son has real electricity, though. “There are things I know that you don’t know,” William explain to honest farmer Trywell (Ejiofor), demonstrating the dynamo concept using a transistor radio with the batteries removed. To build the windmill, he must sabotage his father’s trusted bike to prise a wheel off, and it’s at this suggestion that Trywell blows his top, regretting ever giving his son the impetus to absorb such jumped-up notions. Given his furious power as a righteous hero figure in 12 Years a Slave and elsewhere, it’s compelling to watch Ejiofor’s despair explode on screen as wrong-headedly as it does here.

At heart, this is a story about entrepreneurial initiative, and a younger generation showing the way forward while elders step back and swallow their pride. The Kamkwambas – as Trywell’s wife Agnes puts it, in a strong, anguished turn by Aïssa Maïga – had vowed never to pray for rain like their ancestors.

Those prayers are answered in another fashion, closer to home, in a story about contemporary Africans which may have more teachable moments than unexpected contours, but comes good in the end.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is on Netflix UK from March 1

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