Wolfram

In 2018, I concluded my review of Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country with the opinion: ”So, ‘Sweet Country’ is a thought-provoking if under-explained film – though it does much to prepare us for the Coniston Massacre that happened in that very area just a few years later”.

Theoretically, Wolfram, Thornton’s latest, is a post-Coniston sequel to the first film set in 1932 with some of the same characters and definitely that same, bitter country somewhere outside Alice, where the law is a gun in the hands of a white bastard and its original inhabitants are flotsam to be swept aside at will. At a screening in the marvellous Cremorne Orpheum cinema, Thornton agreed that Sweet Country had needed healing; that its angry men needed the antidote of good women. But then he admitted: “I don’t understand women!”.

So, what emerges from his misunderstanding?

Well, he still despises the men – the racists, the sexist, the vicious and the weak – bringing Thomas M Wright’s pathetic bully character Kennedy back from Sweet Country, only to get his just deserts. The turncoat Aranda man from that film, Archie, also gets his. Matt Nable’s Billy, hectoring boss of the wolfram mine where the film opens, meets a snake. And John Howard’s Christian mining licence administrator rarely stands up for anything in the face of the one-dimensionally evil Casey (Erroll Shand) and his sidekick. It takes an awful long time for justice to catch up with those two, and even then, one audience member wasn’t convinced that Casey had been hacked to absolute death by a mysteriously-appearing, red-ochred tribesman.

Actually, Casey had been preparing to rape an Aboriginal girl, and she may have delivered the fatal blow. And that level of almost-certainty is typical of the film’s women, headed by “the woefully underused” Deborah Mailman (as another reviewer put it). Mailman plays Pansy, the earth mother, virtually without words, just stoic survival looks and a trail of seeds on her own hairstrings that she hopes will lead her two lost children back to her. She does much with the little that writers David Tranter and Stephen McDonald have given her. We see mysterious flashbacks, but had to be told by someone else how she’d been forced to leave her kids. We needed a more solid and direct connection to allow us the emotions that I assume Thornton must have wanted audiences to share at the end.

Mind you – when I think of Samson & Delilah, where not many audiences would have appreciated his bleak outstation escape for his troubled young heroes. Or The New Boy whose native spirituality is fatally damaged by Christian baptism. I realise that Warwick Thornton doesn’t offer easy answers in his films.

What of his classic bitch hotellier in the unpromising township of Henry? Annie Finsterer plays her tough as an essential character in a community reliant on her alcohol. But Mother Courage? That was Thornton’s surprising model in conversation in Cremorne, which certainly impressed, but may have said more about a possible TV series based on her role than her Brechtian persona in this film.

And, talking of classic characters, I feared the worst when cliched Chinese miners, after discussing the need for more labour on their mine, unctuously greet and employ the lost kids and their minder Philomac – an older version of the important inter-racial character from Sweet Country. However, there’s real development for Ferdinand Hoang’s elder in events leading up to the film’s ‘happy ending’.

Pedrea Jackson’s Philomac is equivocal. He seems to accept bullying by Kennedy, though slyly calls him Dad at one point to remind him of the man’s responsibility for him that was imposed on him in Sweet Country. But when he encounters Kennedy’s dead body, the lad doesn’t known whether to cheer or weep. He is, however, a consistent and resourceful guide for Max and Kid, the children left by an abused Pansy in Billy’s untender care at the mine. And the two girls playing what appear to be boys – Hazel May Jackson and Eli Hart – are a delight throughout as they experience many under-explained events.

“Under-explained”, you may recall was my word for Sweet Country. Now it recurs – in Kennedy choking on water melon, the slap-stick fall of three characters into a mine shaft, Philomac’s parentage, and the role of tribal Aborigines in this increasingly half-caste world. I trust Warwick Thornton will consider more consistent script-writing and editing when he tackles his newest project – leaving the Deserts for newly-founded Sydney as he seeks to tell the heroic story of our first terrorist/freedom fighter – Pemulwuy.

Wolfram opens publically on 30th April.

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