Warwick Thornton's powerful tale of an Aboriginal farm hand on the run after killing a white cattle rancher in 1920s Australia
Director: Warwick Thornton
Starring: Hamilton Morris, Sam Neill, Bryan Brown
Running time: 113 mins
It’s the bleak, searing Australian outback in late 1920s. Aboriginal farmhand Sam Kelly (a brilliant debut performance from Hamilton Morris) is on the run with his wife (Gorey Furber) after killing drunken cattle station master (Ewen Leslie) in self-defense. Tracked down by a posse led by WWI veteran and local lawman Sergeant Fletcher (Bryan Brown), the pair must survive long enough to try and seek a justice they know they will never get.
The visually spectacular Sweet Country opens with a lengthy close-up of a pot boiling over a makeshift campfire, interspersed with scenes of a fight between a white cattle owner and an Aboriginal farmhand. From the very opening scene, we are presented with the main theme of the film, a deep-rooted sense of bubbling racial tension, manifested in the abusive mistreatment of the Aboriginal population of Australia. It’s explicit in almost every interaction between a white and aboriginal character, the assumed social superiority of the white settlers is not to be questioned. The only exception comes with preacher Fred Smith (the excellent Sam Neill), a weather-beaten, compassionate kind of man whose Christian faith tells him that all men are created equal. After meeting his new neighbor, PTSD suffering veteran Harry March (Leslie), Smith agrees to help in getting March’s cattle station in working order, sending aboriginal farmhand Kelly, along with his wife and niece, to assist. But the alcoholic, bigoted March continually abuses Kelly, forcing himself upon his wife, to the extent that Kelly eventually guns him down in self-defense. Immediately understanding the penalties of an aboriginal killing a white, regardless of the context, Kelly and his wife flee, followed in hot pursuit by a posse made up of grizzled lawman and fellow WWI veteran Fletcher, Smith, another local cattle rancher and his Aboriginal aide.
It’s credit to director Warwick Thornton that he has crafted such a beautiful film out of such an ugly theme. It feels increasingly rare in modern cinema to see so much care devoted to each and every scene, and it’s a story that is worthy of being told with his passion and attention to detail. Thornton utilizes a technique in which we see brief, often violent glimpses into the past and future, usually when characters are in significant peril, sometimes representing their innermost thoughts and memories, sometimes grimly predicting what is yet to come. Whilst in description it may sound simple, it’s utilized with devastating effect, creating an ethereal and often nightmarish tone that dramatically heightens important narrative plot points. His use of the unwelcoming Australian outback as an almost post-apocalyptic desert plain is reminiscent of Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout and John Hillcoat’s The Proposition, where even those familiar with the land seem at constant risk of death, both from the unforgiving conditions and the Aboriginal tribes whose land they are trespassing on.
A rare breed of film that takes an adroit, nuanced look at an incredibly important and under-explored subject matter
On the surface, Sweet Country is a simple film of linear plot and muscle, but whereas the traditional Western narrative structure is followed in the opening act, as soon as the posse assemble to hunt Kelly down, nothing is easily predictable. The plot meanders wonderfully, switching focus between Kelly and the quickly fractured posse, displaying a nuance that never relies on a binary ‘good guys or bad guys’ explanation of characters.
As we reach our outdoor courtroom climax, which is held beneath the shadow of a hastily assembled gallows, Thornton takes one last opportunity to keep his audience guessing. An out-of-town Judge, sent to try Kelly, has the outward expression of a man trying to herd cats. Refusing to hold the trial in the town bar (with it poignantly lacking either a courthouse or a church), he tries to impose the rule of law in the streets, as a jeering, blood-hungry mob look on, sitting in the same deckchairs in which we earlier saw them watching and cheering films about the Kelly Gang. But this isn’t a Hollywood film we’re watching, this is a brutally authentic depiction of the carnage and chaos of the racial injustice of 1920s Australia, and his attempt to impose law becomes a Sisyphean task.
Sweet Country is a rare breed of film that takes an adroit, nuanced look at an incredibly important and under-explored subject matter. It packs a beautifully barbaric aesthetic quality that keeps the viewer gripped, promising neither hope nor salvation, but dangling both in front of us just long enough to believe that we might get the happy ending we crave. But happy endings were very few and far between for the Aboriginal population in Australia, and as Sweet Country progresses, so do we see the installation of the white man’s power, be it law, frontier justice, social structure, mob mentality or the church. Yes, it’s an uncomfortable and confronting film, but more significantly, it’s a stunning and, more importantly, an essential one.
Did you know? Sweet Country is based on a real life true crime murder case where an Aboriginal man was arrested and put on trial for murdering a white man in central Australia during the 1920s.
Sweet Country is screening at Broadway Cinema from Friday 9th March
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