Director Warwick Thornton
SWEET COUNTRY B+
Australia (113
mi) 2017
‘Scope d: Warwick Thornton
Special Jury Prize winner at Venice where it premiered, Aboriginal
writer/director and cinematographer Warwick Thornton of 2010
Top Ten Films of the Year: #8 Samson and Delilah takes us into the
Australian Outback at a time when whites were grabbing up all the Aboriginal
lands. Revealing some of the ugly truths
about the nation’s colonial past, the film is told from an Indigenous perspective,
where according to the director, “A lot of our history was written by
colonizers who wanted to write these stories about themselves to put themselves
in a favorable light. A lot of it is a
lie. Now we're starting to write down
our history with our version of events.”
Set in central Australia in 1929 (though it feels timeless and could
easily have been 100 years earlier), the film is shot near Alice Springs and
the MacDonnell Ranges, the birthplace of the director, where the vast and
spectacular lands are an outstanding example of an ancient landscape untouched
by man, barren and empty, with picturesque gorges sculptured by the elements
over time. In something of an assault to
the senses exposing a more primitive, raw edge even before the film begins,
viewers hear a jarring sound design filled with racial insults and threats that
remain off-camera, yet this unorthodox technique prepares viewers for what
follows. In a film where no one person
is essentially a lead character, where all contribute to the whole, the only
certainty is the hardship of the land, where Sam Neill plays Fred, a preacher
who works as a local farmer, who believes all are equal under the eyes of God,
and has an Indigenous couple working for him, Sam (Hamilton Morris) and Lizzie
(Natassia Gorey Furber), treated fairly, sharing meals and dinner prayers
together. Their lives are interrupted by
the presence of a neighbor, Harry March (Ewen Leslie), an ex-soldier still
haunted by visions of the war (WWI), deftly shown through flashback sequences, drinking
himself into a stupor every night trying to forget, yet he asks for help
digging fence posts on his land, borrowing Sam and Lizzie for a couple days while
Fred goes on a temporary excursion out of town.
Closer details, however, show a merciless treatment by the new settlers towards
blacks, dispossessed, thrown off their land, living in slave-like conditions where
they are treated as property for the exclusive use of whites, overworked, usually
working for free, treated like livestock, and forced to sleep with the
horses.
Shot in just 22 days, the film has an expansive feel about
it, covering a lot of ground, using an expressionist style of photography along
with a naturalistic sound design that allows viewers to feel they are right
there, given a front row seat, watching history unfold. Interjected into the story is a somewhat
rebellious half-breed Aboriginal youth, Philomac (played by twin brothers,
Tremayne and Trevon Doolan), who seems to straddle both worlds, rarely
speaking, stealing regularly, however, often getting himself into trouble, but
somehow always slithers out of it. His
developing conscience is at the center of the picture, as he’s a work in
progress, much like the nation as a whole at that stage. Philomac lives with his father, the principal
white landowner of the region, Mick Kennedy (Thomas M. Wright), subjecting him
to all manner of abuse, yet also treating him like a favored son. The contempt shown to the Indigenous
population is on full display throughout this film, as it typifies how whites
view them. This is most clearly
expressed by Harry March, however, in particular during one of the most
disturbingly graphic scenes, as one by one he casually closes the shutters of
his home on Lizzie, literally locking her inside and making her a prisoner, creating
a feeling of dread and slow suffocation until it’s pitch black, using only
sound to express the horrors of sexual assault.
Threats to Lizzie suggest March will skin her husband alive if she
utters a word about it. In the aftermath,
he kicks them out, as if that was the sole reason to ask for help in the first
place, though he really had his eye on a much younger teenage niece that was alertly
sent away beforehand. In conversations
with Sam, he could tell the man was touched in the head and not acting
right. But when Philomac arrives on his
property, March zealously chains him to a rock, but he’s clever enough to
escape anyway, making his way across the desert back to Fred’s ranch, hiding in
a nearby structure as he hears March approaching on horseback, drunkenly bellowing
for Sam to let him in, knowing Philomac is in there (he isn’t), shooting out
the windows and kicking in the door before Sam shoots him dead. Shooting a white man is about the worst
offense possible, as any Indigenous person is presumed guilty by white society,
living outside any democratic process, as they were not citizens at the time
and had no right to vote. Most weren’t
even paid in wages, but forced to receive alcohol or tobacco instead. In Australia, Aboriginals weren’t even
recognized as “people” until a Constitutional referendum in 1967 included them in
the census for allocation of federal seats in Parliament (Australian
referendum, 1967 (Aboriginals) - Wikipedia). Knowing the laws weren’t meant to protect
them, Sam and Lizzie set out into the Outback, where a posse led by Sergeant
Fletcher, Bryan Brown from BREAKER MORANT (1980), sets out after him.
With a nod to Rolf de Heer’s THE TRACKER (2002), Fletcher’s
rage knows no bounds, developing a manic obsession to track him down, where his
feverish anger drives him into the heart of tribal lands, where unforeseen
consequences are all around him, including deadly scorpions, tribal attacks,
and a mutiny in their midst, suddenly finding himself all alone. Singlehandedly entering a desolate stretch of
white desert (shot in the dry salt flats of Lake Gairdner), a lone speck under
an oppressive sun, lost in a sea of emptiness, pushed onwards by madness and
delusion, recalling the brilliant desert scene in Stroheim’s Greed
(1924), where sheer arrogance plunges him further into the depths of his own
doom, eerily shot by Thornton (co-shot with his son Dylan River), mixing
close-ups with extreme wide shots, resorting to stark imagery and surreal hallucinations,
creating an insurmountable confusion, yet somehow he manages to survive, though
still filled with sadistic contempt for the man who got away. In a strange reversal of perspective, we see
Sam and Lizzie actually tracking Fletcher, planting footprints for him to
follow, luring him into a death trap, always remaining just out of range, but
the hardship becomes too much for Lizzie who announces she’s pregnant. This has a profound effect on the outcome, as
the presumed outlaws suddenly turn themselves in, seen sitting in the middle of
the street one morning before Sam is locked up and threatened with a hanging. The town itself is dangerously unbalanced,
with white men largely outnumbering the women, mostly due to land opportunities
driven by the cattle industry. When a
judge arrives (Matt Day), there’s no church or courthouse, so seats are set up
on the middle of Main Street, with a table for the judge. Bringing civilized decorum to an unruly town
that’s never had to follow rules, Thornton uses an interesting device to
illuminate the moral hypocrisy of the town’s lynch-mob mindset, all gathered together
in the center of the street to watch a movie, of all things, in this case The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), the
first full-length narrative feature film, an Australian outlaw epic with
sympathies clearly leaning towards the escaped outlaw (gunned down in a police
shoot-out 26 years before the release of the film), painting police as comical
hooligans, a film that was so successful with the public that a law was
introduced (fearing civil disobedience) banning “bushranger” productions, or
films about escaped convicts, which remained in effect until the 1940’s. As much as the town loves and identifies with
Ned Kelly, something of an Australian folk hero, they fiercely condemn Sam
Kelly (yes, given the same last name) with a pathological bloodlust. It should be pointed out that at Coniston
Station in 1928 (Coniston
:: The Coniston Massacre), just 400 kilometers from Alice Springs, more
than 100 Aboriginal men, women, and children were slaughtered by murderous
shooting parties that went on a two-month shooting binge in retaliation for the
death of a local white man who took liberties with a married Indigenous woman, murdered
by her husband, with a court inquiry declaring “the killing of all blacks to be
justified” afterwards, the last legally sanctioned massacre against Aborigines,
where an Indigenous population that was estimated to be about 500,000 in the
late 18th century had shrunk to just 31,000 by 1911. With subtle character development, using
dialogue sparingly, and both flashbacks and flash-forwards in presenting a strangely
compelling narrative, along with non-professional Aboriginal actors, the
director’s use of various desert landscapes is simply stunning, creating a
poetic exploration of racism and colonial exploitation.
