Jonah takes to the screen
How to pour one man’s life into under three hours’ television time? That was the challenge and the undoing of Three’s ambitious Jonah, the life and times of the great, late Jonah Lomu (Sunday and Monday, 8.30pm).
I liked it, and I didn’t, because some of it was great and, well, some of it wasn’t.
Let’s start with the best bit, which is undoubtedly lead actor Mosese Veaila. If you judge a performance by how completely an actor inhabits their character, then Veaila – a recent graduate of Toi Whakaari – has triumphed, because you can absolutely believe that he’s Jonah. In contrast, the actors playing All Blacks coach John Hart, team doctor John Mayhew and Jonah’s longtime agent Phil Kingsley-Jones don’t look anything like their subjects and from my experience, don’t really talk like them either. That’s probably unfair, and isn’t to say they weren’t good – and maybe it’s not crucial in a dramatised version of the story.
I also really liked the scenes from Jonah’s family life. They seemed authentic and well observed, thanks in part to Sesilia Pusiaki, who was excellent as Jonah’s mother, and also to the wise decision to record that dialogue in Tongan, with English subtitles. I assume the credit for that must go to Halaifonua Finau, who appears thrice on the credits, as writer, trainee producer and Tongan advisor.
Jonah offers a more sympathetic portrayal of Lomu’s dad, Semisi, than we’ve seen in previous tellings of the tale, but it certainly doesn’t shrink from showing the grimy bits of his upbringing.
Here’s another positive: in what is an absolute rarity for a sports film, the simulated match action isn’t completely hopeless. And I was impressed with whoever in the wardrobe department had gone to the trouble to source authentic 1990s rugby kits, and jeez they look good – even down to the ancient Mt Wellington Warriors league jersey Jonah wears when he sneaks out of school to play the other code.
Is it nitpicking then, to be annoyed that they went to the trouble of getting the right shirt, but then have Jonah saying he just played against ‘‘Carlton’’, when there’s no such league club of that name? Likewise, is it unfair to be
irritated that every changing room he’s shown in has a convenient and unlikely signboard with the club’s name written all over it (presumably as a guide for the viewer), and on one occasion, the name of the fixture he’s about to play in?
I also liked that it was thorough. A research team led by former sports journo Jane Dent gathered more than 200 hours of interviews with family, friends, teammates and mentors, and all his wives – and given the feuding over the Lomu legacy, that would have taken tact and determination. But again, you’d need a decent working knowledge of the Jonah legend to understand who everyone was, because people come and go with the briefest of introductions.
That added to a disorienting feel: the scene changes were rapid, which I found frustrating: every time some vignette began to develop, such as Jonah paying an impromptu visit to a terminally ill 8-year-old, it was time to move again. It felt as if we may have been better served to be given a representative chunk of Jonah’s life, instead of following him from troubled teen all the way until just before his premature death at 40, in 2015.
The decision to jump back and forth in time only added to that – but probably what made it most jarring were the graphics, which looked like they’d be done by a 12-year-old given a very short deadline and let loose on PowerPoint. Watching ‘‘AUCKLAND 1995’’’ scroll across the screen in chunky grey capital letters with a drop shadow was really quite irritating and deflected from the story.
But as we all know, the Jonah story is a hell of a yarn. So ignore the graphics, focus hard on who’s who, and enjoy the tale of one of the greats.
Ahigh school drop-out from a grim council estate, Shane Meadows represented a new generation of British kitchensink directors who had lived the stories he told in films such as This is England, Twenty Four Seven and A Room for Romeo Brass.
As Meadows rose to fame he took a core of actors with him – Meadows’ work is where Paddy Considine got his start. It also kicked off the career of Stephen Graham (Snatch, Line of Duty, Funny Cow), and Graham and Meadows have reunited for Rialto’s three-parter The Virtues (starting on Sunday August 18, 8.30pm).
We meet Graham’s Joseph as he prepares to farewell his young son, headed for a new life in Australia with his ex-wife and her new partner, and watch his life unravel painfully from there. A storyline of childhood sexual abuse parallels, Meadows has said, his own experiences. It is, like most of his films, at once both compelling and painful.