Something keeps telling me I shouldn’t be as down on Westerns as I have been in the past. The reason for its cultural and artistic appeal, even to this day, is out of a sense of moral ambiguity. Of a land untamed by man, unchained by law, where the only way to make things right is to right them for one’s self. Sure, its presence in American and even Australian folklore can feed into certain power fantasies that shouldn’t apply in societies that keep insisting that they are bound by rules of law… but as someone who tends to feel less safe, rather than more, whenever law enforcement officers are nearby, even I can understand the draw of that kind of story.
Of course, that runs into the problem of who has been holding the pen when writing those stories. It’s a period in time when men were damn-near encouraged to take the law into their own hands… but only the men, and even then, only some of them get the benefit of doubt in altercations with firearms. As I got into when I reviewed Sweet Country, there’s a thick vein of hypocrisy in our own country’s glorification of the image of the outlaw, as they were (and in many ways still are) willing to denigrate for embodying a different variety of that same image. This is the reason why Revisionist Westerns exist in the first place, and it’s why this particular one managed to grab my attention and keep it.
Leah Purcell, who also worked on the anthology film Here Out West, writes, directs, and stars in this look at the colonial days of the Aussie Outback. A mother of four, with a fifth well on the way, she defends her homestead with rifle in hand, and bloody hell, does she do terrifically here. She grabs that heroic iconography with both hands, but rather than play into the aforementioned fantastical side of things, she wields it here as a matter of pure survival. Whenever it gets to the point of drawing her weapon on another living thing, it’s never out of vindictiveness or even vengeance, but out of preservation of self and same. It’s the maternal instinct of protection, sharpened to a point at the end of a spear.
From there, the film deals in a lot of charged imagery to do with the relationships between men and women, and especially White men and Indigenous peoples, and the way DP Mark Wareham frames them against the gorgeous vistas of the Australian Alps really makes it hit home. While I’d argue that the film puts a little too much focus on Sam Reid’s Sgt. Klintoff, his place in the story does make sense as he is essentially the embodiment of that frontier hypocrisy. He’s a man of law, not of morals, and by his own admission. That he makes the distinction in the first place explains the land, while his leaning towards the former explains himself and the people who dwell there.
Some of the plot beats are admittedly kind of obvious from a distance, but the writing manages to get around that by including two different kinds of plot reveals here: Those for the audience, and those for the other characters. And it’s because of the hard hits of the latter, which involve Purcell’s Molly and her own family history, that the former is made more palatable, especially since it drives home the story’s emphasis on intersectionality and the importance of true equanimity. If you claim to act in the best interest of others, whether as enforcers of law or as social allies, the issue is much bigger than one’s self, and it should be treated accordingly. To this end, it’s the conversations between Molly and Jessica De Gouw as Klintoff’s wife that bring everything into focus, and highlight just how important this kind of storytelling is.
Yes, not just the story itself, but the form in which it is delivered. In the process of making this (not to mention its prior incarnations as a stageplay and novel), Leah Purcell has made a step towards reclaiming the national narrative as having been started by, and predominantly starring, White men. Its depictions of cruelty and disregard can be quite difficult to take in, much like similar moments in Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale, but because the framing and focus are so crystal-clear throughout, there is never a point where it becomes exploitative. Instead, it remains firmly humanistic, creating a call to arms for all who see injustice to stand together, not on top of each other.
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