Sweet Country
SWEET COUNTRY, Western, rated R, in English with some subtitles, Center for Contemporary Arts, 3 chiles
Warwick Thornton, an Australian of indigenous descent, has made a classic Western that could as easily be set in the austere open spaces of John Ford country. Instead, it unfolds in the central Australian outback, with themes that would be at home in both places.
It’s loosely based on the true story of an Aboriginal man who killed a white man and fled into the outback. The setting feels timeless at first, but mostly like the 19th-century Wild West. It comes as a bit of a culture shock late in the film to discover a silent movie being screened on a bedsheet outside the dusty little town’s saloon. We’re in 1929 Australia, where the work of displacing the continent’s Native inhabitants is in full force.
Sam Kelly (a powerful Hamilton Morris) works for Fred Smith (Sam Neill), a racially tolerant white man of deep religious convictions. A new neighbor in the territory, a racist, alcoholic war veteran named Harry March (Ewen Leslie), comes calling to ask for the use of Smith’s indigenous hired hands to help him in setting up his ranch. Smith is reluctant, but succumbs to an appeal to his Christian charity, so he loans out Kelly and his family. And from there, predictably, things go all to hell.
The act of violence that sends Kelly and his wife, Lizzie (Natassia Gorey Furber), fleeing is one of self-defense. But a black man in that time and place knows he has no better chance of making that case than a slave in the antebellum American South would have had under the same circumstances. The manhunt is joined, led by police sergeant Fletcher (Bryan Brown,
Breaker Morant) and scouted by Archie (Gibson John), and they trail the Kellys deep into uncharted outback, where the land is harsh and tribes of unfriendly Aboriginal people still lurk. Eventually, his posse falls away, Fletcher is on his own, and only an act of selfless charity saves his bacon.
The movie shows us, near the start, a snippet from Sam Kelly’s trial, and flashes back from there, so it is no spoiler to say he is eventually taken into custody and brought to “justice.” The trial is presided over by an itinerant judge (a good Matt Day), who hears and weighs all the evidence so scrupulously that he seems to have dropped from another planet.
Thornton (who also served as his own cinematographer) and screenwriters David Tranter and Steven McGregor lay out unsubtle but powerful themes of racial injustice, and the performances and stunning visuals lift the film into memorable territory. The dialogue is sometimes a bit heavy-handed, but half the time you can’t make out what they’re saying anyway, through the dense Aussie dialect. The indigenous characters, speaking a pidgin English that is only slightly less intelligible, are subtitled. — Jonathan Richards