Pray the Devil Back to Hell
In 2003, a few hundred Liberian women managed to achieve peace - or something amazingly close - for their western African nation. Their efforts are recalled and captured in "Pray the Devil Back to Hell," a modest but effective work of documentary uplift that opens today at the Coolidge. The film showcases the women who fought warlords and insisted that Charles Taylor, Liberia's corrupt president, take seriously their demands for calm.
Under Taylor's leadership, civil war began to destabilize the region in 1989. Taylor recruited - no, wrangled - the country's boys to fight for him against rebels. Many of them killed in drug-induced haze. Some were encouraged to slay their own parents.
The film's directors, Gini Reticker and Abigail E. Disney, wisely opt for a ground's-eye view of the women who'd had enough of terror. They sit before the camera and lay out not so much how the strife began but how they perceived its horrible endurance. A women-for-peace movement grew out of that awareness, as women who lived under Taylor's rule saw a country undone by men desperate for money and power.
The more we learn of how Leymah Gbowee led the country's Women in Peacebuilding Network on its shrewdly apolitical crusade for peace, the clearer it becomes that there's something chillingly familial about the dynamic. In essence, it's wives and mothers taking on husbands and sons. In the capital of Monrovia, Gbowee, a trauma specialist by training, a leader by nature, formed a coalition of Christians and Muslims that was too urgent to be controversial. (As one of the crusaders observes, "Does a bullet know Christian from Muslim?") The group held rallies and staged a powerful sit-in with the intention of urging Taylor to attend peace talks.
The movie uses a standard mix of footage (gun-toting baby warlords; the peace talks in Accra, Ghana) and those interviews with Gbowee and the other spellbinding women who worked alongside her. The longer the film goes on, the more you crave a vaster history of modern Liberia, originally a colony founded by former slaves from the United States.
The focus remains on the women's difficult work, and it's commendable of Reticker and Disney, as well as brave from a dramatic standpoint, to make a background figure out of Taylor, who was charged with war crimes and resigned in 2003. (He's probably scarier that way.) But Gbowee and other members of her coalition also credit themselves with making possible Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf's election as president in 2005, a momentous event that is a footnote here.
President Johnson-Sirleaf's story seems in some way bound to that of the amazing women in "Pray the Devil Back to Hell." It would be just as heartening to see hers told, too.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston .com/movienation.
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