Produced by Chiara Menage, Cat Villiers, Chris Brown, Jackie O’Sullivan

Cast: Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Emily Watson, Danny Huston, John Hurt, David Wenham, David Gupilil, Leah Purcell, Tommy Lewis, Richard Wilson.

 This well-crafted, original take on the Western genre set in the sweaty, dusty Outback of Queensland, Australia in the 1880’s, pits British colonial lawmen against white outlaws and renegade Aborigines. The period is set before the credits with sepia photographs of colonial Australia: Aboriginal trackers, British soldiers, stiff and unsmiling, with rifles beside them. It’s an unforgiving, ungiving and lawless land. The camera pans over the bodies of a family of settlers, shot in the head, lying in their beds, an infant between them. The law’s violent retaliation comes in the middle of the night in a hail of gunfire and screams, decimating the shack where the outlaw gang is holed up with some Asian prostitutes. Two are captured, some die and the rest escape to the desert.

The Burns brothers gang, Arthur (Danny Huston), Charlie (Guy Pearce) and 14 year-old Mikey (Richard Wilson) and others, are allegedly responsible for the savage rape and murder of the settler family. The law is in the person of British trooper Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), a man who is given to staring broodily at the heat haze over the desert and quoting Shakespeare, “What fresh hell is this?” along with his running motif of “I will civilize this place”. Brutally threatening the captives, he offers Charlie a proposition. Young Mikey will hang on Christmas Day, unless Charlie finds and kills his older brother Arthur, the leader of the gang.

It’s a risky move, based on Captain Stanley’s astute assessment of the characters of the three brothers: all of them feral, Charlie is the most rational, between the deranged Arthur and his favourite younger brother. A deal of tension exists between Captain Stanley and his need to show strong leadership to his troops and his employer, wealthy land owner Eden Fletcher (played with dandified iciness by David Wenham). Neither has any use for the Captain’s subtle cleverness. Stanley’s decision to let Charlie go is met with anger by pitiless guards wanting revenge for the brutal crime and taken out on Mikey, cowering wounded and whimpering in a roofless cell.

On his horseback journey to betray his brother, a solitary Charlie is dwarfed by the wild barrenness of the terrain, making his dilemma weightier. Shimmering heat, flies, dust, the sharpness of pale sandstone rocky outcrops and dead trees against a vast, empty sky, gullies and flat plains comprise a godforsaken place into which even blackfellas, according to the troopers, will not venture. Guy Pearce’s Charlie has stillness and grave introspection overlaid with feral cunning.

Skilful writing by Nick Cave has paralleled the character arcs of Charlie and Stanley, his main antagonist. Representative of the lawless outsider, Charlie functions as a kind of balance between the two extremes of his brothers, forced into having to betray one to save the other. Stanley is a representative of order, needing to appease the demands for revenge of both his troopers and the townsfolk. He functions to balance the representatives of civilisation and genteel society in the persons of the vicious Eden Fletcher, as insane in his controlling way as Arthur Burns, and his own gentle, lonely English wife Martha (played delicately by Emily Watson) whom he endeavours to protect from the harsh crudeness of this colonial outpost.

A shadowed gully deep in the wild rocky canyons of the desert is the gang’s sanctuary, and Charlie’s after he is nearly speared to death by renegade aborigines and treated by the healing poultices of Queenie (Leah Purcell), an aboriginal woman of Arthur’s gang. It matches and contrasts with the cool sanctuary of the Stanleys’ colonial bungalow, where a burdened, pain-harried Stanley collapses under the caressing ministrations of Martha Stanley, and takes tea in fine bone china cups within deep verandas a step away from the heat-hazed open desert.

The plan to rescue Mikey hatched by the two older brothers is made more perilous by Arthur’s discovering the deal made between Stanley and Charlie, and another threat in the form of evil bounty hunter Jellon Lamb, an obnoxious drunk played by John Hurt.

Several powerful scenes stay in the memory. Charlie encounters Lamb in a filthy grog hut and their poetic, if brutal, interaction has even more brutal consequences once Lamb sobers up to fulfil his mission. A screw-loose, trigger-happy member of Arthur’s gang, Sam Stote, played by a maniacal Tom Budge, sings like an angel a traditional Irish song, a Capella, in the natural acoustical theatre of the rock-walled gully. The gang members, aided by a versatile aborigine called Two Bob (Tommy Lewis) execute a daring deception to rescue Mikey and the final bloody shoot out is a result of all those silent days and nights Charlie spent on horseback, considering the impossible proposition Stanley put to him and how he will solve it.

Simple, evocative music of composers Warren Ellis and Nick Cave is a resonant presence throughout and the locations, around Winton in the Queensland Outback are a stunning force in the film.

Despite its savagery this is a superbly poetic and original film, one of the year’s best, showcasing the talents of writer-director team Nick Cave and John Hillcoat in a gritty, believable story of brotherly love and betrayal, and the temptation into the degradation of revenge that is the consequence of violence.

© Avril Carruthers                        5^th October 2005