Review: Sweet Country

Few Australian films these days feel relevant let alone essential, but Sweet Country, an outback Western set in 1929, is one of those films. The second narrative feature from Indigenous director Warwick Thornton (Samson & Delilah, 2009), Sweet Country is beautiful, important and utterly gripping, from its first close-up of black tea and white sugar boiling in a billy as racist violence occurs off screen, heard but not seen. The mystery of this conflict, and its eventual consequences, are unspooled in a confident and original narrative that's exciting despite its unhurried bleakness and the intimations of inevitable tragedy.

Inspired by real events, with a screenplay by sound recordist David Tranter and writer Steven McGregor (Redfern Now, The Mystery Road series), the story concerns an Aboriginal stock-hand (Hamilton Morris) on trial for the murder of a white man. Flashing forwards and backwards in time, (sometimes for the briefest of moments, like a flicker of memory or prescience) the film traces the events leading up to the murder, involving the stockman's wife (Natassia Gorey-Furber), a shell-shocked war veteran farmer (Ewen Leslie) and a mischievous mixed-race boy (played by twins Tremayne and Trevon Doolan). We follow the pursuit of the accused man and his wife across vast and stunning landscapes by a bloody-minded police officer (Bryan Brown in fine and familiar form), with a gentle Sam Neill in the role of the kind Christian farmer who employs the accused and tries to be the voice of reason. Matt Day plays the judge sent from the city to preside over the dusty outdoor courtroom. These scenes are stunning in the economy and eloquence with which they depict the absurdities and cruelties of dealing with Indigenous experience within the white legal system.

Thornton is an accomplished DOP as well as director. (His cinematography credits include Radiance and The Sapphires as well as his own shorts, documentaries and features.) Here he gives the impression of simplicity, but using images captured with double-mounted cameras and post-production processing, the grain of natural elements is presented in contrast to the lack of grain in human structures and skin. It's a subtle effect, felt rather than seen, but giving fresh spirit to the much-photographed Northern Territory landscape. Simplicity is evident too in the complete lack of a musical score, and yet this adds rather than detracts from the film's emotional impact.

Sweet Country premiered in September 2017 at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize, and went on to win the Platform Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival. Frequently likened to two other excellent Australian films, The Proposition (John Hillcoat, 2005) and The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002 ), Sweet Country is, in its own way, more sophisticated and nuanced than those films, with light and shade in characters on both sides of the racial divide. And while Sweet Country is an angry film, likely to inspire rage and shame in the white viewer, there's something hopeful about seeing a story so well told, and in looking Australian history full in the face.

Sweet Country is in Australian release from 25 January 2018.

Four Stars
Rochelle Siemienowicz

Review: The Maze Runner: The Death Cure

 

One of the more surprising things about the surprisingly entertaining third and final installment in the Maze Runner series is that it’s an action movie that uses its action to explore character. Or even just that it’s an action movie full stop: most YA franchises have focused on world-building and character-based drama, two things this film is barely interested in. It’s a generic post-apocalyptic world with only one modern city left and the story is barely more than a series of escalating rescue attempts. This breakneck pace occasionally leads to some head-scratching moments – one previously dead character returns with the explanation “I wasn’t dead – you just left me for dead”, while another important character introduces himself as “a businessman” and then in his next (and final) scene blows himself up for reasons that make no business sense whatsoever – but these are good plot problems to have, because they mean this is a movie that isn't interested in slowing down.

All you really need to know here is that on one side are Thomas (Dylan O’Brien), sidekicks Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) and Frypan (Dexter Darden), and hard driving love interest Brenda (Rosa Salazar) trying to rescue bestie Minho (Ki Hong Lee) from the baddies, who include evil scientist Ava (Patricia Clarkson), evil thug Janson (Aiden Gillen) and possibly evil former gal pal Teresa (Kaya Scodelario). The bad guys are pretty bad, and not just because their corporation is called WCKD: they’re torturing kids who are immune to the mutant-zombie creating Flare Virus because tortured teens give off brain chemicals that could maybe be used to make a cure. 

(there’s an interesting question there about the ends justifying the means and so on, but this is too busy blowing things up to do more than occasionally wave in that general direction)

Usually a film like this would get less interesting the further away it moved from the central events of the story (to be fair, this film's minimalist approach to its characters does mean that the rare moments of drama between them carries real weight). “Action” in the old Hollywood sense of actions carried out by the lead characters (shoot-outs, blowing up bridges and so on) has largely been replaced by increasingly generic and special effects-heavy “spectacle” designed to look impressive but tell us almost nothing about the characters taking part, as seen in pretty much every superhero movie this decade. 

It’s only recently (and largely confined to the John Wick films in cinemas) that we’ve seen even a slight return to the idea that how a character operates in an action sequence might actually tell us something about them as a human being. Ideally action sequences in blockbusters should function the same way as musical numbers in musicals – the story is suspended to move into an area of pure cinema that gives us an insight into the character’s inner life – but in practice stunts and CGI take precedent almost every time.

Here though, the constant action (generally well handled by director Wes Ball, even if the bad guys can't shoot straight) actually does illuminate the differences between characters. WCKD city is repeatedly presented to us as a maze-like collection of streets and corridors, which makes sense considering trapping teens in a maze was the whole point of their evil scheme in the first film. But time and time again while the bad guys operate in two dimensions our heroes work in three: on at least three occasions where it looks like the bad guys have trapped Thomas and company they escape by moving vertically out of a previously horizontal situation. 

Partly that's simply because moving up or dropping down makes for a cool visual. But it also makes sense for who the heroes are and the world they want to create: if you’ve been trained to fight by being trapped in a maze, your idea of escape isn’t going to be running down more corridors or roads, but soaring over them. It’s no surprise then that the one character here who straddles both worlds is eventually presented with an escape that requires them to move from the horizontal to the vertical, the whole film building to a moment where survival literally requires them to embrace a new way of moving through the world. 

Which is pretty impressive considering it's also the same "you gotta jump now!" action movie climax we've seen a thousand times before.

Anthony Morris

Review: All the Money in the World

Inspired by real events around the kidnapping of 16-year-old John Paul Getty III in Rome in 1973, and based on John Pearson’s book Painfully Rich: the Outrageous Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J. Paul Getty, Ridley Scott’s latest film is a tense crime thriller with an unforgettable monster at its heart. Like the heated media scrum around the real kidnapping, the film itself has attracted media furore because of the last-minute re-shooting and re-editing to replace disgraced actor Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer in the role of the hard-hearted tycoon. The good news is that Plummer is perfect as the calcified miser who must win at all costs. Spacey would no doubt have created his own brilliant villain (perhaps one day we’ll see that version on a DVD extra), but now it’s hard to imagine anyone bettering Plummer’s Getty. Read the full review at SBS Movies.