Monthly Archives: July 2022

  • Nitram

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Justin Kurzel (2021)

    ‘I was on TV once,’ the title character tells Helen, an eccentric heiress with whom he’s developed an unlikely friendship.  Justin Kurzel supplies the proof in the opening sequence of Nitram.  In 1979, a reporter is interviewing children in the burns unit of a hospital in Hobart, Tasmania.  Her first interviewee, heard while the screen is still dark, confirms they’ve had to undergo skin grafts and won’t be playing with fire in future.  The next kid, who does appear, is a blonde boy of eleven or twelve years, with burns to his hands as a result of experimenting with firecrackers.   ‘And will you be doing that again?’ asks the concerned yet complacent voice of the unseen interviewer.  ‘Yeah,’ the boy replies.  ‘But haven’t you learned your lesson?’  ‘Yeah, but I’ll still play with them’.  The boy is Martin Bryant, who graduated, terribly, from firecrackers to firearms.  Seventeen years later, he shot dead 35 people and injured 23 others.  Bryant is ‘concurrently serving 35 life sentences, plus [sic] 1,652 years, all without the possibility of parole, at Risdon Prison in Hobart’ (Wikipedia).

    Kurzel ends with more factual material, in the form of text on the screen.   The Port Arthur massacre of April 1996 brought about rapid reform of Australian gun laws and the confiscation of many thousands of firearms; but no state has fully complied with the legislation enshrined in the National Firearms Agreement, and the number of guns owned in Australia is now higher than in 1996.  The TV news film of the actual, pre-adolescent Martin Bryant provides Nitram with a compelling beginning, those statistics with a startling end.  The intervening drama, which features some fine acting, is grimly absorbing.  The film is far superior to the only other Justin Kurzel picture I’ve seen, his ill-conceived Macbeth (2015).  But its real-life basis makes Nitram a doubly troubling and a fundamentally objectionable piece of cinema.

    The Wikipedia page on Bryant summarises psychological and psychiatric assessments of him, before and after April 1996, and instances of his aberrant behaviour in childhood and adolescence (torturing animals, pulling the snorkel from another boy underwater, cutting down trees on a neighbour’s property).  Nitram doesn’t include flashbacks to his early years (except via that piece of news archive) but Kurzel and Shaun Grant, who wrote the screenplay, immediately suggest their protagonist has the mental age of a child, is perhaps on the spectrum and sociopathic.  He lives at home with his parents.  He gets disability pension payments but doesn’t have a job.  He doesn’t really have a name, except we learn that the bullies who made his school life a misery reversed the letters of Martin, presumably to deride him as a ‘nit’.  A film-maker dramatising factual material of this kind has to decide how much they’re offering a character study, how much a case study.  Justin Kurzel falls between two stools.  His portrait of Martin Bryant is largely behavioural, in the sense of showing what he does rather than exploring who he is.  But Nitram isn’t made in a faux-documentary, dispassionate style that might be seen to reflect the mindset of an affectless killer.  It veers, rather, between horror story and emotive, upsetting family drama.

    In the former mode, Nitram is competent but conventional.  The ominous, oppressive music by Jed Kurzel (the director’s brother) works on your nerves but it’s too familiar to be disorienting.  The narrative is hardly suspenseful:  you feel knotted up simply because you know things are heading for a ghastly climax.  The main characterisations and relationships are a different matter.  Nitram (Caleb Landry Jones) is the picture of a misfit – straggly-haired and sweaty, not exactly overweight yet paunchy, uncoordinated in his movement.   As such, he’s a pitiable figure.  You’re encouraged to feel he wants to connect with people, and sorry that he can’t.  In this respect, he’s kin to screen sociopaths like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976) and Arthur Fleck in Joker (2019).  The obvious, chasmal difference is that those two, though they may be intended as proxies for real-world types and tendencies, are fictional creations.

    The lead in Nitram had to be an exciting challenge for Caleb Landry Jones.  I’ve not usually liked his work but the strength of his commitment to such a daunting role as this is, in principle, admirable.  A self-demanding actor will naturally try to understand and show what makes their character tick, even when the character’s a time bomb, and that’s what Jones is striving to do here.  His approach is doomed to failure because the script treats Nitram as a nearly inexplicable monster.  Jones, forced to make bricks out of straw, does the decent thing in terms of an actor’s engagement with a character:  he sympathetically stresses Nitram’s hopeless frustration.  You’re bound to wonder what survivors of the Port Arthur attack, let alone the friends and families of those who didn’t survive, make of this.

    Nitram first meets Helen (Essie Davis) during his short-lived attempt to earn money mowing lawns in the neighbourhood.  When he can’t even get the lawnmower going, Helen invites him to walk her many dogs instead.  This fey, fiftyish woman, heir to a share in the ‘Tatts’ company that runs national lotteries in Australia, lives in a shabby mansion, without human company, among various reminders of her past glories on the (amateur?) stage – theatre posters, press cuttings, Gilbert and Sullivan tunes on the record player.   Helen buys Nitram a car, despite his not having a licence and despite, when they take it on a test drive, his grabbing for the steering wheel while Helen is driving.  He moves out from his parents’ place and in with Helen.  Another crazy lunge from the passenger seat causes an accident in which she is killed and Nitram seriously injured.  Helen’s will names him a major beneficiary.

    In scenes with his mother, Carleen (Judy Davis), and father, Maurice (Anthony LaPaglia), Nitram seems capable of more normal emotional reactions.  His parents want to buy a bed and breakfast on the coast.  The father’s idea that Nitram could help run it may be wishful thinking but Maurice does secure a business loan and puts in a bid for the property.  When he’s gazumped his son is sensitive enough to be outraged for his mild-mannered father.  (Even though Nitram’s immediate response is childish, you almost want to cheer when he empties a big jar of complimentary sweets in the estate agent’s reception area onto the floor.)  The offence he feels on Maurice’s behalf stays with him.  Rich, thanks to Helen, Nitram turns up at the Seascape Guesthouse with a load of cash that he presses on the new owners (Ian Hume and Carolyn Hume) in a vain bid to regain the property he believes should have been his parents’.  Maurice free-falls into despair and commits suicide.  Nitram takes some care over his appearance for the funeral but turns up ‘dressed like a clown’, in the words of his distressed mother.  ‘You are not going to embarrass me today,’ Carleen tells her son, refusing to let him attend the service.

    Judy Davis and Anthony LaPaglia give outstanding performances.   Their exactly opposite physiques play a crucial part in expressing how Nitram’s parents cope, or don’t cope.  Davis’s Carleen is a rail-thin chain-smoker, continuously inhaling and trying to expel the worry and exasperation her son causes her.  LaPaglia’s Maurice is more indulgent of Nitram, and more overtly distressed by his extreme behaviour, yet seems to bear his wretched responsibilities in the excess poundage he carries.  The burden of being Nitram’s father has settled on him as dead weight.  One of the film’s most distressing moments comes when Maurice has sunk into depression and Nitram comes back to his parents’ house to see him.  The father lies curled up on the sofa; his son starts hitting him to rouse him from stupor; Maurice, whimpering, moves only enough to try and fail to fend off the blows.

    There are things relating to Nitram’s behaviour that don’t add up dramatically.  This might sound like a plausible presentation of a disturbed mind but it comes to seem less a psychological insight than a weakness of the script.  During the time he’s with Helen, they meet up with his parents on Nitram’s birthday; while the two women are alone together Carleen tries to find out what Helen sees in her son.  Even allowing that Helen is herself an oddball, the reply that he’s considerate, funny and so on makes no sense.  The sequences inside the mansion tend to show Nitram at his most creepy and unnerving:  he spooks Helen when he appears half-undressed in her bedroom late at night; he produces an air rifle that she insists he get rid of.  We’re shown next to nothing of what she supposedly finds engaging about him.  In response, his mother responds by recalling an episode in her son’s early childhood.  They were in a department store; he went missing and couldn’t be found.  Distraught, Carleen rushed out of the store to drive to the nearest police station.  When she got in her car she found her son lying between the front and back seats.  Seeing the state she was in, he laughed and laughed – ‘He was laughing at my pain’.  This incident is wonderfully related by Judy Davis but, since Nitram was only five years old at the time, his cruel mischief hardly seems (as it seems meant to be) proof positive of a set-in-stone pathology.

    The owners of the Seascape Guesthouse are the first people Nitram kills when he eventually goes on the rampage.  If they’d been his only victims, the motivation – the combustion of feelings of righteous indignation and an irrational mind – would be clear enough but what compels the larger-scale carnage in Port Arthur is left sketchy.  Nitram watches a TV news report about the Dunblane school murders (in March 1996) and takes things from there.  This follows the line of the defence psychiatrist at Martin Bryant’s trial but Justin Kurzel doesn’t convey much sense of Nitram becoming preoccupied (as the trial psychiatrist claimed Bryant was) with the actions of Thomas Hamilton, the Dunblane killer.  We recognise the Broad Arrow Café, where most of Bryant’s victims died, as the location where Nitram and Helen celebrated his birthday with his parents, but that occasion is memorable in the film only thanks to the puzzling exchange between Helen and Carleen.

    If Wikipedia is to be believed, Kurzel and Shaun Grant omit some seemingly significant people in order to simplify and streamline the narrative.  Martin Bryant wasn’t, as the film strongly implies Nitram is, Carleen and Maurice’s only child.  When Bryant was befriended by the heiress Helen Harvey, she was living with her elderly mother:  three years later, Harvey was reported to local health authorities, who found that she and her mother, who died a few weeks later, were in urgent need of hospital treatment.  ‘A clean-up order was placed on the mansion and Bryant’s father took long-service leave to assist in cleaning the interior’:  in the film, Maurice never sets foot in the place.  Although this pruning of facts isn’t, in itself, exceptionable, it has the effect of distorting the actual timeframe of events.  Bryant was twenty-eight at the time of the Port Arthur massacre.  Caleb Landry Jones was just over thirty when Nitram was made, and his appearance hardly changes in the course of the film.  This reinforces the impression that we’re watching events leading up to the massacre over a period of time far shorter than was really the case:  Bryant first met Helen Harvey nine years before he killed.

    The murders at the Seascape Guesthouse and the Broad Arrow Café were far from the only ones Bryant committed, and the mayhem actually continued into a second day.  His last victim was a hostage whom he took back to the guesthouse and killed while the police were trying to negotiate with him there.  The film’s omissions in this respect, and Kurzel’s staging of the climax, leave you grateful for small mercies.  Nitram is seen in long shot knocking on the front door of Seascape and, when it’s opened, firing on the unseen couple inside.  In the café, he orders a snack from the girl at the counter (Charlotte Friels) and sits down to eat and drink.  He takes from a sports bag one of the rifles he’s recently acquired, and sets up a video camera on the table.  Kurzel then cuts, for the final sequence, to a television, also in longish shot, showing a news report of the massacre.  No one is watching the TV but the camera moves outside the room to reveal Carleen.  She sits alone and silent, smoking her nth cigarette.  At this point, words seem to fail, as well as Nitram’s mother, the film itself – until the final revelations about the reform and abuse of Australian gun laws.

    Kurzel has prepared the ground for those with what’s perhaps the single most alarming sequence in the whole of Nitram, when the title character goes shopping for firearms.  The film is remarkable throughout for some first-rate naturalistic acting in small roles – Charlotte Friels (Judy Davis’s daughter), Ian and Carolyn Hume, Anita Jenkins as a travel agent, Fergus O’Luanaigh as an assistant in the gun shop.  (Just about the only exception is Annabel Marshall-Roth, who overdoes the heartless, smiley estate agent giving Maurice the bad news about the B&B.)  The most potent cameo, though, is from Rick James, as the no-nonsense gun shop owner.  He shows Nitram how to use various weapons.  He’s unperturbed by his customer’s lack of a licence since Nitram doesn’t intend to register the guns anyway.  Although the gun merchant’s monologue gives added impact to the textual epilogue, this last-minute change of focus is – like Nitram as a whole – dubious.  Justin Kurzel appears to suggest his primary concern throughout has been to point up the perils of uncontrolled gun ownership.  His urgently important and responsible closing message comes too late to compete with the bizarre personality of Martin Bryant which, unexplained as it is, dominates Kurzel’s gripping but essentially irresponsible film.

    6 July 2022

  • Pather Panchali

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Song of the Little Road

    Satyajit Ray (1955)

    The first part of Satyajit Ray’s ‘Apu Trilogy’ concerns one family, living in Nischindipur, a village in rural Bengal, in the second decade of the twentieth century.  Adapted by Ray from Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s 1929 Bildungsroman of the same name, Pather Panchali is a fine example of how a film artist, in illuminating a circumscribed world, can express larger human truths, even though praising the film in those terms understates the socio-economic reality – the poverty – of the family’s life, which Ray describes in thorough, vivid detail.

    The story begins shortly before the birth of the character who will be the trilogy’s title character and protagonist.  Harihar Roy (Kanu Banerjee), educated but impecunious, earns a paltry living as a Hindu priest but still dreams of success as a playwright and poet.  His already careworn wife, Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee), keeps house, cares for the couple’s daughter, Durga (Runki Banerjee), and is pregnant with their second child.  In and around the family’s dilapidated dwelling there’s a sparse but varied collection of animals – cats, a dog, livestock (a couple of chickens and goats, a single cow).  The household also includes Harihar’s ancient cousin, Indir Thakrun (Chunibala Devi), who lives a hand to mouth existence in a literal sense.  She exasperates Sarbajaya by stealing food from the Roys’ already meagre larder.  We see Apurba (Apu) as a newborn and an infant but chiefly as an eight-year-old (Subir Banerjee).  By now, Durga is thirteen (and played by Uma Dasgupta) and the sister-brother relationship is central to Pather Panchali.

    The (black and white) visualisation of the landscape and changing seasons is lyrically imaginative yet Ray and his cinematographer, Subrata Mitra, never indulge in facile idealisation of the natural world.  As rain falls, lily pads flip over, almost as if choreographed; the snakes that slide into the family home aren’t so lovely.  In a field of wild sugarcane where the siblings often go, the white kaash flowers in bloom, taller than the children themselves, are enormously beautiful but, when Apu is briefly lost among them, an unnerving wilderness.  The field is appealing to him and Durga not just as a playground but as a vantage point from which to watch a distant railway train.  In the same spot, the children find and put their ear to an electrical grid, listening to its mysterious hum.  These signals of modern technology are quite alien to Apu’s and Durga’s experience but nonetheless intriguing to them:  the train rattling by is the sound of the world beyond Nischindipur.  That world also impinges in visits to the locality by a travelling theatre (jatra), whose show spurs Apu into homemade playacting, and a uniformed Indian military band, parping out ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ to a puzzled, rapt audience.

    Pather Panchali features two deaths, which make a powerful impression by virtue of the difference and the link between them.  As Apu and Durga return through the forest from one of their train viewings, they come upon Indir, sitting on a tree stump and apparently asleep.  When Durga speaks to and gently shakes Indir, her dead body falls to the ground.  At the start of monsoon season, Durga dances ecstatically in the torrential rain.  This is Ray’s most powerful illustration of the beauty and brutality of nature.  The dance is an elating but fateful image:  Durga catches a chill, develops a fever, and dies.  The contrast between the passing of an extraordinarily old, exhausted woman and the extinction of an early teenage girl whose life has barely begun is more poignant because it was Durga who discovered Indir’s corpse – encountering death for the first time not long before her own.  In early scenes, the child Durga steals mangoes from a tree in the garden of the Roys’ better off neighbour, Mrs Mookerjee (Rama Gangopadhaya), to give to Indir.  Near the end of the film, after Durga has died, the hitherto querulous Mrs Mookerjee calls on Sarbajaya with a gift of fruit from the tree.

    Ray’s cast comprises an amazing collection of eloquent faces and bodies.  There’s a temptation to assume, because they inhabit their characters so completely, and perform so naturally and luminously, that the cast can’t have had prior acting experience.  This was far from the case although the experience varied.  Kanu Banerjee was an established Bengali film actor and Karuna Banerjee an amateur actress with the Indian People’s Theatre Association.  Uma Dasgupta had appeared in productions at her school.  Ray advertised in newspapers, inviting boys between five and seven years to audition for Apu; Subir Banerjee didn’t apply but was spotted by Ray’s wife in the Kolkata neighbourhood where they lived at the time.  The most amazing face and body of all belong to Chunibala Devi as the bent-double, cadaverous Indir.  Devi was a former stage actress whom Ray persuaded to come out of retirement to play the role.  Well into her eighties, she died before Pather Panchali was released but not before Ray came to her home (in one of Kolkata’s red-light districts) with a projector to show Devi the film.

    At certain moments of dramatic importance, Ray removes the sound of the characters’ voices.  These interruptions are few and well chosen; the most startling occurs near the end of the film.  Unable to make ends meet from his local work, Harihar journeys to the city and is away for several months.  He returns, unaware that his daughter has died, and excitedly shows his wife the gifts he’s brought the family.  When he asks where Durga is, Sarbajaya breaks down.  Her scream is supplied by a burst of keening music that’s uncharacteristic of Ravi Shankar’s score but the hardest part of it to forget.  The mother is perhaps the film’s most remarkable character.  At first, Sarbajaya comes over as a dreary nag; you gradually realise that her default scolding expresses the depth of her love for her family and concern that it may not survive.  She and her husband eventually decide to leave Nischindipur and head for Benares, Harihar’s ancestral home.  The film ends with Apu and his parents, and their very few possessions, leaving the village in an ox-cart.   Ray manages to make this an image of desolation and of possibility.  Pather Panchali is widely recognised as a classic, and so it should be.

    3 July 2022

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