Steven Benedict looks beyond the tries, the haka, and the legend to find Jonah Lomu the shy young man, caught between ancestral inheritance, global fame and the brutal machinery of professional sport.
Vea Mafile’o and Gavin Fitzgerald’s LOMU retraces the wondrous life and heartbreaking death of Jonah Lomu, rugby’s first global superstar. Recognising that their subject’s life deserves more than a full-time analysis from TV pundits, the directors give us a portrait of an athlete as a gifted, confused, troubled young man.
Granted access to previously unseen home films as well as exclusive interviews with Lomu’s mother and brother, Mafile'o and Fitzgerald present the sporting triumphs alongside the fame, the divorces, the financial strain, and the loneliness of a shy man turned into a commodity.
Born to Tongan parents who were the first generation of their culture to assimilate into European-New Zealand culture, Jonah was steeped in his parents’ traditions while also magnetised by what modernity had to offer. Where once his ancestors lived in tightly knit communities, he swapped the traditional tupenu and ta’ovala for a black rugby shirt and boots, finding curious kinship with a group of muscular men whose uniting ethos was winning at all costs.
So, what you’re seeing here is not just a documentary of a sporting giant but a collision between a Pasifika, faith-centred upbringing in South Auckland and the machinery of industrialised sport. And running through all of it is the haka before every international: a Māori challenge laid down on the eve of battle, ancestral memory summoned against the men on the other side of the halfway line. The film lets a quiet complication sit inside the ritual – the haka is Māori, yet here it is led by a Tongan boy from South Auckland, one more inheritance absorbed into the emblem of a young nation still deciding who it is.
But that’s not to suggest that this is some arid, academic treatise on post-colonialism disguised as a documentary about a sporting giant. LOMU is a swift-moving, deeply felt portrait of Tongan culture; a crucial era when rugby moved from an amateur game to a professional sport; and above all, a reminder of just why we are watching the film.
I enjoyed this documentary very much, but my one overriding quibble is the title. It is an extreme rarity that a sport is so blessed to have such a charismatic, magnetic genius that the world’s eyes focus not so much on the contests but on the individual. And to such an extent that the athlete practically personifies the sport itself. At that point, you only need one word to identify who they are and their sport. Pele, Tiger, LeBron, Serena, Usain. That’s how big Jonah was.
And Mafile’o and Fitzgerald pick their archival footage carefully, so while never just a showreel, you are still left breathless by the speed, agility, guile, naivety, and irresistible power Jonah had on the pitch. So much so that you sometimes wonder whether you’re watching a superhero movie – aged 19, he ran in four tries in the semi-final against England. Then, in 1999, again in the semi-final, this time against France, five French players converged on him as he raced towards the try line. That is one third of a rugby team trying to stop one man. And he bulldozed them all.
And yet, and yet, New Zealand didn’t win, and so Jonah never got his medal. In 1995, the same year the All Blacks were struck down with food poisoning before the final against South Africa, Jonah was diagnosed with a genetic kidney disease that doctors could not cure. The giant played much of his career gravely ill, needing dialysis and, in 2004, a kidney transplant.
By the age of 40, Jonah was gone. Talk about Homeric cruelty.
IFI will hold a special screening of LOMU on Monday 7 September at 18.10, followed by a Q&A with director Gavin Fitzgerald.
