Directed by John Boorman. Starring Juliette Binoche and Samuel L. Jackson. Rating unavailable.

Sometimes there's a fine line between profound and dull, and In My Country crosses it early and never comes back. Certainly, there's an important movie to be made about South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and that movie has already been made: it's a 2000 documentary called Long Night's Journey Into Day.

What is so significant about that public process, which wrapped just two years ago, is that more than 26,000 perpetrators (black and white) of crimes large and small came forth to confess them in detail and be confronted by the victims and surviving families. Amnesty was thus tied to honesty-a better way to launch a new democracy than some methods we've seen recently, although not without its own glitches, of course.

The prize-winning U.S.-made doc showed the courtroom confrontations in their harsh reality. The best thing you can say about In My Country is that it faithfully re-creates some moments of truth, if not reconciliation, not previously covered by cameras. It's the other stuff that's the problem.

U.K.-born director John Boorman, who has directed as many duds (Zardoz, Beyond Rangoon) as winners (Deliverance, Hope and Glory), appears to have a tin ear for dialogue. In any case, his films are generally as good as their scripts.

Here, former lawyer and activist Ann Peacock, a British South African, has very loosely adapted Antjie Krog's book The Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa. Fortunately, that title wasn't retained, although its earnestness infuses Peacock's Screenwriting 101 saga of the troubled relationship between white Afrikaner Anna (Juliette Binoche), covering the hearings for public radio, and Langston (Samuel L. Jackson), an American reporter from the Washington Post.

Their hookup, which starts with snarky speechifying and then shades into vapid romance, and then more speeches, has the effect of overshadowing the terrible tales of young black men stabbed in their cells or women being raped and tortured in Zululand-although these recollections are potent enough in the purely verbal telling. The central affair, between married people under duress, also guarantees that the movie's main conflict is between an angst-ridden white woman and an outraged American, with black Africans sent again to the sidelines.

Their one representative is Anna's perennially cheerful soundman, played by Menzi Ngubane, who is at least a spark plug for the dour proceedings. That's not to imply that the leads don't give it their best; indeed, Jackson and Binoche struggle all too visibly with characters and dialogue that would be wooden in anyone's hands. Brendan Gleeson also turns in what should have been a potent performance as a brutal police general but it's ruined by the confusing and momentum-killing way his scenes, with Jackson's reporter angrily grilling the unrepentant Afrikaner, are dropped repeatedly into the story.

In the end, it's good to hear so many wrongdoers say "I'm sorry"; in fact, it might soon be time for Boorman to apologize as well.