SWEET COUNTRY
(R16, 113 mins) Directed by Warwick Thornton
Based loosely on events that unfolded not too far from Alice Springs in the late 1920s, Sweet
Country arrives with a heartbreaking relevance to the present day and its credibility utterly intact.
The land is populated by a hard-bitten cross section of impoverished farmers – many of them still haunted and derailed by the horrors of World War I – and the Aboriginal population, often brought in from other parts of the country as an indentured workforce, slaves in all but name. The place is a powder keg of bigotry, ignorance and resentment.
An Aborigine stockman named Sam (played by first-timer Hamilton Morris) has killed a local landowner. The shooting was an act of provable self-defence. But Sam knows all too well that white man’s justice in that part of Australia rarely allows its better angels to fly to the aid of a black man. And so Sam and his wife – pregnant after being raped by the man Sam has killed – flee into the outback.
Taking up the chase are a small cohort of locals, including Bryan Brown’s troubled and hard-drinking small-town police sergeant, Sam Neill’s hand-wringing self-appointed preacher and a couple of local larrikins who want nothing more than to see the errant Sam at the end of a rope, and bugger any nonsense about a black man getting a trial.
Sweet Country soon settles into the familiar rhythms of a Western. But director Warwick Thornton (who made the stupendously good Samson and
Delilah in 2009) never lets this film get too close to being anything we are prepared for.
That Sam will outwit and evade his quarrelsome and mostly drunk pursuers is no surprise. But why and how Sam should come back to town and what happens when he gets there, show Thornton has got more on his mind than just an angry broadside against Australia’s long history of abuse.
Make no mistake, Sweet Country is a film with fury in its soul, but the execution (no pun intended) is beautiful, moving, engrossing, measured and surprisingly funny at times. Thornton’s most flamboyant gesture is to include scenes of the townsfolk enjoying a screening of the 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang, glorifying the outlaw who murdered several policemen in the 1870s. Thornton doesn’t need to do much else to point out the snivelling hypocrisy of a society that will celebrate and deify its white criminals while baying for the blood of its black ones.
Sweet Country is a gorgeously photographed, scored – without music – and realised film. You won’t regret or forget that you have seen it.