Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy

For a nun in the 1940s, Sister Eileen is surprisingly progressive. That seems especially so with regards to the indigenous orphans she cares for. Admittedly, the Australian government ripped them away from their families and culture, but at least she tries to provide a sheltering sanctuary for her charges. However, the latest arrival is quite mysterious (according to both the conventional and Catholic meanings of the word) in director-screenwriter Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy, which opens in select theaters this Friday.

It is clear from the opening scene that Sister Eileen does not approve of the outback copper transporting her newest resident in a burlap bag. It is also clear that she runs the show at her remote orphanage-school, not the unseen authority figure, Dom Peter, for whom she claims to speak.

Even his fellow students consider their new classmate a wild child. They simply call him “the New Boy,” which Sister Eileen also adopts until a better name comes along, perhaps through divine intervention. Maybe that would not be so impossible. The New Boy seems to have supernatural healing powers. He also shows a strange affinity for the antique crucifixion altar piece that arrives shortly after he does. It is not exactly reverent awe. It is more like a sense of empathy for Jesus.

Arguably, the film’s identity politics could have been even more didactic. However, the allegorical religious symbolism remains crushingly heavy-handed. Somehow, Thornton’s screenplay finds a way to be maddeningly obtuse and glaringly unsubtle. Nothing whispers in The New Boy. Instead, everything scrams—despite the attempted dreaminess of Thornton’s work as his own cinematographer.

Cate Blanchett labors as Sister Eileen to deliver the film through its aesthetic temptations and stifling thematic travails. However, the most interesting portrayal is that of Wayne Blair, as George, an indigenous convert, who clearly relates to the student-orphans in very complex but personal ways. Likewise, Deborah Mailman also adds a lot of humanistic sensitivity, as “Sister Mum,” another indigenous convert, who presumably took orders after the tragic deaths of her children.

Unfortunately, despite the uniformly strong performances, the third act is just an impenetrable muddle. It is not a case where viewers might have fun debating elements left open to interpretation. Rather, it is a murky mess that leaves Thornton’s intentions unclear—and consequently unfulfilled.

Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country

He is an outlaw named Kelly from Australia, but his circumstances are entirely different from those of old Ned. Based on the historical figure of Wilaberta Jack, Sam Kelly will kill a white man in self-defense. It is entirely justifiable, but this is Central Australia in 1920, so Kelly immediately takes flight. His fictionalized treatment becomes the stuff of a revisionist Australian Western in Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

When Fred Smith talks about God and his Christian faith, he really means it. That is why Sam and Lizzie Kelly really are fortunate to work for him. Regrettably, Smith’s new neighbor, Harry March, a WWI veteran suffering from PTSD, is not so enlightened. He cynically exploits Smith’s Christian charity, guilting him into loaning Sam and Lizzie to help whip his station into working order. Unbeknownst to Sam, March will act in a predatory manner towards Lizzie and then dismiss them from his property. The next time they encounter each other, March is shooting up the absent Smith’s farmhouse, accusing the Kellys of harboring a young runaway aboriginal station hand, loaned to him by the exploitative Mick Kennedy.

Old Sam has little choice but to blast a load of buckshot into March. Having no faith in the white Crown’s justice, Sam and Lizzie head out into the wild country. Inevitably, the hard-charging Sergeant Fletcher forms a posse with Kennedy and the reluctant Smith to give chase. However, many of the town’s poor white rabble will be surprised by the professionalism of circuit court Judge Taylor.

Sweet Country would be something like an Australian fusion of Chato’s Land and To Kill a Mockingbird, if it were not so conscious of its own social significance. Thornton lays it on heavy and never passes up an opportunity for a teaching moment. Yet, response to the film will likely be particularly divisive because of his idiosyncratic practice of flashing forward to briefly depict a character’s most significant moment, either when they are first introduced or at times of extreme stress. Although it is initially disorienting, it gives the film a really distinctive vibe over the long run.

It is also intriguing to watch how Thornton observes and subverts Western cinema conventions. He certainly addresses the film’s moral issues in stark black-and-white terms, but it should be noted Smith is an entirely sympathetic and empathetic character and the grizzled Sgt. Fletcher evolves in intriguingly ambiguous ways.

The fact that Smith and Fletcher are played by two of Oceania’s most recognizable thesps, Sam Neil and Bryan Brown, certainly will not hurt the film’s prospects. Neil is particularly engaging and ultimately quite poignant as the decent Smith. Indeed, it is quite refreshing to see a devout Christian treated with such respect in a film. Likewise, Matt Day’s portrayal of the judge is intriguingly messy. He has his moments, both good and bad. Yet, it is the nonprofessional Aboriginal actors Hamilton Morris and Gibson John, who really power the film, as the taciturn Kelly and the more ingratiating Archie (just Archie, he says), Kennedy’s foreman, who serves as the posse’s tracker.

Both Thornton’s style and his conspicuous manipulations can be distracting, but his boldness earns the viewer’s respect. It is uneven, but it successfully differentiates itself from the scores of international Western riffs. Recommended on balance for fans of socially conscious revisionist Westerns, Sweet Country opens this Friday (4/6) in New York, at the IFC Center.

Margaret Mead ’14: The Darkside

It is sort of like ethnographic research for the campfire. Indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton invited Australians to submit stories about their interactions with the spirit world as part of a larger oral history project with an aboriginal focus. However, the results were not always as spooky as he expected. Family and loss are the primary themes of the thirteen tales re-told by screen-actors in The Darkside (trailer here), Thornton’s documentary by monologue, which screens during the American Museum of Natural History’s 2014 Margaret Mead Film Festival.

Like nearly every anthology film, Darkside is a bit uneven, but Thornton, serving as his own cinematographer, always gives his static shots a warm eerie glow befitting the subject matter. By far the scariest story (and the one most riveting to watch) chronicles the tragedy wrought on the narrator’s family by a cast-off Ouija board. Occasionally, Thornton breaks format, as when he pans and scans the darkened corridors of the National Film and Sound Archive. Another more traditionally creepy tale of the supernatural, it should particularly interest AMNH patrons, since it involves poet Romaine Moreton’s brush with the malevolent spirit of Sir Colin Mackenzie, the notorious director of the discredited Australian Institute of Anatomy, whose building was repurposed to serve as the film archive.

For fans of 1980s movies, it is quite amusing to see Bryan Brown turn up as one of the storytellers, but his yarn does not have the archetypal weight of the better installments. Easily, the most emotionally resonant tale is logically the final chapter, whereas the penultimate segment features the liveliest delivery. Oddly, the weakest anecdote, a mere sketch about a traditional aboriginal grandfather’s response to a lunar eclipse apparently inspired the one-sheet, but at least most of the constituent ghost stories hold some sort of deeper cultural significance.

Executed with tremendous sensitivity, Darkside is a quiet film that takes its time finding its footing, with some of the earlier stories feeling like warm-ups for the heavier stuff to follow. It is a bit unusual to have a Margaret Mead selection that is so appropriate for Halloween programming, but its concern for indigenous people and oral history nicely fits the festival’s mission. More elegiac than scary overall, The Darkside is recommended for viewers interested in indigenous Australian culture and the ghost story-telling tradition when it screens this coming Sunday (10/26) at the American Museum of Natural History as part of this year’s Margaret Mead Film Festival.