Wah-Wah

Pace the personal dramas in Wah-Wah out over the course of five years and you’ve got the makings of a cracking British TV soap, one of those awfully atmospheric things set in colonial Africa involving booze, adultery, and racial and class conflict. Cram it into one semiautobiographical filmmaking debut for actor Richard E. Grant (Withnail & I) and you’ve got an overdeveloped coming-of-age potboiler set on the eve of Swaziland’s independence. About a Boy‘s Nicholas Hoult plays Grant’s stand-in, Ralph, coping with a mother (Miranda Richardson) who runs off with another man; an alcoholic father (Gabriel Byrne); and an outspoken American stepmother (Emily Watson), who identifies foppish British slang as so much ”wah-wah.”