'Endurance' Star Outpaces Disneyfication By Desson Howe Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, May 21, 1999

"Endurance" chronicles how Haile Gebrselassie became a champion. (Hollywood Pictures) Director: Leslie Woodhead Cast: Haile Gebresellaise; Yonas Zergaw; Shawananness Gebrellasie; Tedesse Haile; Bekele Gebresellasie Running Time: 1 hour, 23 minutes Contains accounts of a tough childhood and an untimely death

A gazelle of a runner in long distance competition, Gebrselassie is equally captivating in person. A soft-spoken man with regal lines framing his Ethiopian face, he speaks of his hardscrabble childhood with such understatement that you almost crane forward in your seat.

Until adolescence, he says, he spent his life in a one-room house with nine siblings, one devoted mother and one misery-inducing father who never spared the rod.

"Sometimes he beat us two times a day," says Gebrselassie quietly. "Sometimes three times."

If Gebrselassie's father instilled anything in his son other than pain, it was a devotion to God and hard work. In the agrarian society in which they lived, this was a matter of survival. All the children shared crop gathering, oxon-pulling and other duties, living directly off the land.

But from this existence, Gebrselassie grew in a different direction. His running took him away from that life. Running six miles to school each way, running for three hours a day to get water. Eventually, his running would take him to Atlanta in 1996, where he won the gold medal for the 10,000 meters.

After we have heard from Gebrselassie, it's time to watch him. A camera follows him from a moving vehicle as he breaks into a long run across the semi-arid countryside of his birth. He pads the scrubby Ethiopian landscape with uncanny elegance. The countryside speeds by. You can hear his breaths – short and rhythmic. Compelling Ethiopian music shimmers in the background. We are gliding along with him. It's a simple, but exhilarating indication of Gebrselassie's graceful athleticism.

The excitement mounts as we go to Atlanta for the biggest race in his life. The movie follows the race for a moment, only to go back in time to Gebrselassie's childhood. It's at this point that we stumble into a Disneyfication marathon in which director Leslie Woodhead reenacts the highlights of Gebrselassie's life with real people, as opposed to professional actors. The runner is played by himself, then as a young boy by Yonas Zergaw. Some performers are even related: Haile's father as a young man is played by the actual father's first cousin. And Haile's mother is played by Haile's sister, Shawanness Gebrselassie.

There's a documentary sense of reality, since Ethiopians from the same environment, and even the same family, are playing the roles. But there's also a disconcerting taint of artificiality. The movie's purpose is to extol Gebrselassie, but it does so in glowing, ultimately banal terms. The story – which includes a tragic loss in the family, and a courtship with Haile's future wife (Alem Tellahun) – is performed woodenly. Consequently, "Endurance" feels too forced to take to heart. In the end, what redeems the film is Gebrselassie's ability to transcend the attempts of this movie to render him the African equivalent of a Norman Rockwell painting.