After bringing Shakespeare to the big screen with Macbeth,
and delivering a much-maligned but still admirable attempt at video game
adaptation with Assassin’s Creed, director Justin Kurzel has reunited with
screenwriter Shaun Grant to once again step into Australia’s dark history to
bring us a film about the quintessential Aussie legend: The outlaw Ned Kelly.
The two have already proven their salt as a team with Snowtown, and Shaun
Grant’s writing did a great service to the cultural hiding featured in Jasper Jones, and
true to form, their efforts here make for a powerful piece of cinema.
Opening on the statement “Nothing you’re about to see is
true”, the film sets itself up as a demystifying of the Ned Kelly legend. It
strips him of so much mythos that, by film’s end, it’d be an easy route to
consider this a film that just happens to feature Ned Kelly, since the film’s
actual scope proves far greater than just the actions of one man.
Instead, it serves as a snapshot of Australian culture at
that time in history, where the British stranglehold on the country was at its
tightest and when the immigrants and convicts of the country were at their most
subjugated. It highlights a rather crucial aspect of the country’s origins,
that being an attempt by the British to colonise and spread their own cultural
perspective to (to them) new land.
This is best epitomised by Nicholas Hault’s
role as a constable, whose overbearing presence as the representative of the
crown ends up embodying how they treated their own colony. When he takes Ned
Kelly’s baby into his arms, points a pistol at its face, and threatens to
charge the mother with child endangerment and neglect, the country’s history
with child displacement and forced assimilation emerges through a single monstrous image.
It plays into the Aussie cultural cringe, that aspect
of our culture that we much prefer to just sideline entirely rather than
actually come to terms with, and it does so through the eyes of Ned himself.
2020 is raring to be an interesting year for actor George MacKay, between his
work on A Guide To Second Date Sex and his performance here, as his version of the
outlaw is far less noble than the cultural memory would have us believe. He is
still presented as part of the larger problem in regards to what the British
did to this country and the people they brought here, but his rebellion against
it is more primal, more visceral, and makes a point to highlight how the legend
of his life and impact on history tends to be gussied up for the retellings. It even makes for some unexpected queer imagery in how the Gang do their banditry while wearing dresses, playing into their own 'deplorables' status.
The cast across the board is pretty fucking choice, starting
with Essie Davis of Babadook fame as Ned Kelly’s mother. Her place as the head
of an Irish immigrant family sets the pace for the story’s frictions between
the ruling class and everyone else, and when confronted with the notion of
selling her boy off to a British-run school, her rebuttals end up highlight the
other, far more prevalent examples of displacement in colonial history.
Seriously, the fact that the Stolen Generation’s facticity is still being
argued to this day is a fucking disgrace.
From there, along with MacKay and Hoult, there’s Russell
Crowe’s initial role of Harry Power, Ned Kelly’s mentor. The scene of him
singing to Ned’s family about how the police are a bunch of cunts might be the
most quintessentially Aussie moment I’ve ever covered on this blog, as the
national fascination with Kelly boils down to how he is the representation of
standing up against the authoritarian claws of the colonialists.
That scene
also gives a good indicator for the welcome sense of dark humour on display,
right down to him and Ned finding a dead convict who had his testicles cut off
and shoved into his mouth. Oh, and there’s Hoult’s proclamation of “Everything
in this fucking country is trying to kill us”, a phrase that is basically the
go-to whenever people outside of Australia try and describe Australia.
In the midst of all the grime, the misery, and the
uncomfortable examination of our own past, the film itself largely serves as a
series of emblematic phrases and images that, between them, typify a startling
amount of our cultural heritage, our seeming lack-of-connection to the convict
stain that forms part of that heritage, and why Ned Kelly as a figure has
remain in the national zeitgeist. Much like Snowtown, it’s a film that unearths
events that most Australians would rather just forget entirely; there was a
quite infamous moment where one of our own critics, Richard Wilkins, didn’t care
much for how Snowtown’s depiction of real-life serial killers was too graphic
and disturbing.
In the film’s own words, we fear what we don’t understand,
and in terms of history, that fear can lead to the
raw truth of that history being buried under mounds of shame and cultural
cringe. And it’s why Justin Kurzel shows himself back in prime form here
because, in every single way, this production steadfastly refuses to let that
happen.
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