Warwick Thornton (2017)

The physical setting of Warwick Thornton’s ‘kangaroo Western’, shown at this year’s London Film Festival, is perhaps not the title character but it is the star of the show.  The adjective in the film’s name is ironic:  Thornton describes the violent racism of a 1920s frontier-town and its environs in Australia’s Northern Territory – the persistent physical and verbal abuse of Aborigines, the heedless miscegenation.   The director is also the cinematographer and Sweet Country’s atmospheric visuals are impressive.  The bleached ground and red mountains are pitiless.  The heat is intense.  A murder trial takes place alfresco – in one of the film’s rare comical touches, the public gallery is a couple of rows of deck chairs.  The man on trial is Sam Kelly (Hamilton Morris), a middle-aged Aboriginal stockman, and his face is no less compelling a camera subject than the vast landscape and skyscape.  The look of the film isn’t matched by its other elements.  The script by David Tranter and Steven McGregor is weak.  There are good people in the cast – Ewen Leslie, Bryan Brown, Sam Neill – but there’s some laboured acting from a few others.

Sweet Country begins with an image that’s immediately confirmed as emblematic.  A cauldron of liquid is boiling on a campfire.  On the soundtrack and off-camera is accompanying argy-bargy between two male voices – one of which insults the other in racist language.  It turns out that the black man on the receiving end was Sam:  as a result of this dispute, he, his wife Lizzie (Natassia Gorey-Furber) and her daughter[1] moved to work on the land of Fred Smith (Sam Neill), a Christian preacher.  Decent (and naïve), as well as devout, Smith believes ‘we are all equal in the sight of the Lord’.  Before going off to town for a few days, he arranges for Sam to help Harry March (Ewen Leslie), a newcomer in the territory, renovate the cattle yards he’s recently taken over.  Also assigned to this work are two non-whites who work for another white station-owner (wooden Thomas M Wright) – his stockman Archie (Gibson John) and illegitimate son Philomac (played by twins Tremayne and Trevon Doolan).  The viciously screwed-up Harry March soon emerges as a racist and a rapist:  he disciplines Philomac by chaining him to a rock; he forces himself on Lizzie.  Smith has left Sam in charge of his house while he’s away.  In a shoot-out there, which March initiates, Sam, in self-defence, shoots him dead.

Sam and Lizzie go on the run, with the local lawman Sergeant Fletcher (Brown) leading the posse in pursuit of them.  Archie acts as tracker; Smith comes along too with a view to ensuring that Sam is brought back alive.  The search is fruitless and the posse breaks up; Fletcher nearly dies in the punitive heat and owes his survival to Sam.  The latter, when he discovers his wife is pregnant, returns home.  Since Sam isn’t able to father children, he knows that March must have impregnated Lizzie.  At his trial, the fair-minded, out-of-town judge (Matt Day, also wooden) finds Sam not guilty and tells him he’s free to go.  The verdict is intolerable to the white community.  As he and his family leave the area, with Fred Smith providing the transport, Sam is killed by a sniper’s bullet.  In a closing, rhetorical appeal to the heavens, the distraught Smith asks, ‘What hope is there for this bloody country?’

Perhaps there’s a positive answer to Smith’s question in the wily mixed-race youngster Philomac, who not only escapes his punishment by March but turns out to be the resourceful survivor of the story as a whole.  The film says more unequivocally, however, that Christianity and legal justice are ineffective in the face of gun law.  Although that seems meant to be the clear message of Sweet Country, it’s skewed by the fact that both Harry March and Sergeant Fletcher have recently returned from fighting in the Great War, which has left an indelible impression on both.  March stands in the yard outside his station, doing lone rifle drill.  Indoors, he sits by the fire, haunted by memories that he tries to drown in alcohol.  Fletcher is less extreme  – he’s given to reciting the ‘They shall not grow old …’ lines from Laurence Binyon’s For the Fallen – but he, as well as March, is described as ‘mad’ by another character in the course of the action.  The traumatic legacy of warfare makes the piece more historically specific but March is such a crucial figure in it that his disturbed state of mind dilutes the force of the idea that the terrain of Sweet Country is fuelled by inherent human racism and brutality.

Warwick Thornton fancies up the sparse plot with subliminal flashes back and forward in time, some more easily comprehensible than others.  The lethal wounds of March and Sam are shown in extended gory close-up.   It’s presumably symbolic that the only significant white female character (Anni Finsterer), who runs the local bar and shares Fletcher’s bed, is a non-speaking part.  There is no music either.  This is effective:  it deprives the audience of what might have been a protective distance from the unyielding geography that dominates Sweet Country.

13 October 2017

[1] The actress isn’t credited on IMDB or Wikipedia.