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