Lee Tamahori’s latest very much a f ilm of two halves
The Convert (R13, 119 mins)
Directed by Lee Tamahori
Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett
***½
We are in New Zealand, maybe a year before the signing of The Treaty of Waitangi. The Māori population of the country is around 80,000, while European settler numbers are closer to 2000. The Europeans exist here only by the forbearance of Māori and, yet, the balance of influence is irrevocably tilting.
Settlers are arriving with horses, iron tools, a new system of religious belief and – catastrophically – muskets. The latter were intended to be used by settlers and soldiers, but were also traded to local chiefs, upending old balances of power and tearing Māori society apart like a virus.
Feuds that might once have been decided by a handful of deaths via taiaha and patu became massacres and routs. Traders made fortunes by exploiting the supply of the weapons for grotesquely inflated prices. Traditional lands were abandoned, tribes became refugees in their own country and an early chapter in New Zealand’s colonial history was written in avarice and murder.
Lee Tamahori (Mahana) sets The Convert right in the guts of this foundational decade. Churchman Thomas Munro arrives by schooner to take charge of a tiny congregation at the fictional settler community of Epworth.
Munro and crew land in the middle of a skirmish between two iwi, and we glean pretty quickly, as Munro lays out a warrior with a useful-looking right-hook, that there might be more to this man of God than just choir practice and silly hats.
The sole survivor of one side of this scrap is a young woman named Rangimai and Munro makes it his duty to deliver her back to her people. In doing so, he finds himself on the front lines of a couple of conflicts.
There are the warring tribes, with one side led by the fearsome Akatārewa, intent on moving south and taking over the lands occupied by Maianui and his people. Both chiefs are buying up all the muskets they can, and schooner captain Kedgley has a roaring side-hustle going in supplying weapons to the highest bidder.
Meanwhile, the handful of Pākehā who make up the residents of Epworth are nakedly hostile to the people whose country they are trying to occupy, despite relying on the goodwill of the Māori owners for their existence on the scrap of land on which they have built the town.
The Convert is a film of two halves. Munro’s arrival and early encounters with Maianui – and with the people of Epworth – are efficiently handled. The coming conflict with Akatārewa is clearly telegraphed and we sense the film-makers are as impatient to get to it as we are. But the long minutes spent setting up the conflicts in the village just don’t drive the story along.
We understand the townsfolk are venal and petty people – and Munro’s decision to turn his back on them and throw in his lot with Maianui is exactly what we hope he will do. But the film becomes bogged down in a star-crossed-lovers sub-plot that takes far too long to achieve its purpose in the narrative.
Munro’s relationship with a settler women named Charlotte, who was once married to one of Maianui’s warriors, is a potentially terrific strand of storytelling, which could by itself have driven Munro’s decision to leave the town.
In its best moments, The Convert bangs across the screen like an old-school epic with a story to tell and the smarts to make that story sing. But the connective tissue between those scenes lacks the urgency that a few harsh decisions in the scriptwriting might have unearthed.
As Munro, Maianui and Akatārewa, Guy Pearce, Antonio Te Maioha (Spartacus: Blood and Sand) and Lawrence Makoare (The Dead Lands) are uniformly terrific, with Te Maioha and Makoare sketching in some history between the warring chiefs that perhaps existed in the script only in the white spaces between the written dialogue.
Tioreore Ngātai-Melbourne (Cousins) has been a highlight of every film she has appeared in and she carries on the good work here as Maianui’s daughter Rangimai. Aussie veteran Jacqueline McKenzie is reliably superb as Charlotte. It’s a crying shame the film couldn’t find more for her to do.
The cinematography by Gin Loane is world-class, and the design and staging of The Convert, although the budget clearly wasn’t huge, is uniformly great.
The Convert has some fine scenes and more than a handful of terrific performances. When it works, it works beautifully. But a muddled and unnecessarily cumbersome middle holds the film back from becoming the ride it could have been.
A blistering last line from Pearce absolutely sticks the landing and sent me out of the cinema grinning. A bit more of that verve and clarity earlier on might have led to a sharper and more resonant film.
The Convert is in cinemas nationwide.