Superb Venice & TIFF-Winning Aussie Western ‘Sweet Country’ With Sam Neill [Review]

There are few more charged, more disturbingly redolent images than that of a black man in shackles. And so when Australian director Warwick Thornton, winner of the Venice Special Jury Prize and the Toronto Platform Best Film opens his outback western with just such an image (after an enigmatic prologue of offscreen violence which is gradually explained) it’s like he is drawing a line in the sand — that reddish dust that turns the parched ground round here the color of old blood. “Sweet Country” is unmistakably a western in iconography and spare, taciturn tone, but it is also an incendiary slave narrative, in which the poetry of the filmmaking can barely contain a simmering fury and disgust at this most shameful of human institutions.

That unforgettable, arresting early image is of Sam Kelly (Aboriginal actor Hamilton Morris, getting my vote for standout male performance in the Venice lineup), and the story of how he comes to be chained in irons at the neck, in that long, unflinching close-up, is the story of the film. It is told in more or less linear fashion but interrupted by atemporal flash cuts that create a cleverly unnerving sense of foreboding.

Sam and his wife Lizzie (a watchful Natassia Gorey-Furber, who, like all the Aboriginal actors including Morris, is making her acting debut here) are living and working on a parcel of land owned by Fred Smith (Sam Neill), a fair-minded preacher who believes, “We are all equal in the eyes of the Lord.” This sets him apart from his white landowning neighbors, such as Mick Kennedy (Thomas M. Wright) whose attitude toward his Aboriginal workers, the old, gray-bearded Archie (Gibson John) and the boy Philomac (played by twins Tremayne and Trevon Doolan) is less benign, and especially that of newcomer Harry March (Ewen Leslie), a WWI veteran with a brutal streak who refers to Sam and Lizzie as “black stock.”

When they nonetheless go to do some work for him, as a favor to the kindly Fred who responds to the newcomer’s request for “Christian” neighborliness, Harry takes the opportunity to rape Lizzie. Thornton’s staging of this scene is brilliant and full of dread: Harry simply comes into the house Lizzie is preparing for him while Sam is at work elsewhere, and one by one, closes all the windows and doors, before grunting on top of her awhile and then terrorizing her into silence about the attack.

Later, circumstances conspire to bring Harry back to Fred’s place, this time in a towering rage in pursuit of a runaway Philomac. With Fred gone, Sam and Lizzie are minding the farmstead, and Sam ends up shooting Harry dead in self-defense. The Aboriginal couple then go on the run, with Sam realistically sure that there’s little chance the authorities will go easy on a black man who has “killed a whitefella.” A posse led by local lawman Sergeant Fletcher (Bryan Brown) and guided by old Archie, picks up their trail.

It’s a lean chase narrative that in overaching form is perhaps a touch overfamiliar from genre westerns of the classic era. But it’s set apart, and set alight, by a screenplay (co-written by David Tranter and Steven McGregor) that takes exceptional care in fleshing out all its characters. Sergeant Fletcher, for all his racist bloody-mindedness, is also involved in a sort of love affair with a local barmaid; the boy Philomac is no martyred innocent, but as surly and naughty as any teen left to run wild; Mick Kennedy is eventually stirred to some level of inchoate compassion for the boy (who is probably his illegitimate son); Archie is as cowed into collaborationist submission by his white “masters” as Sam is proudly self-reliant and undaunted; even the film’s villain, Harry March, is given a background of wartime trauma and shellshock that accounts for, while never excusing, his savagery. There is good and bad on both sides of the color divide, indeed most of the characters fall somewhere in between, which lends real stakes to the drama, as even those who do and say terrible things still contain within them a glimmer of humanity, a slim hope of redemption, albeit partial and late-arriving.

Thornton acts as his own DP, with exquisite results: “Sweet Country” is a symphony of almost palpable texture and observational detail. From the loading of a gun with a long, vicious bullet, to the wide expanses of rolling scrubland beneath pink-streaked evening skies, to the rough-hewn, corrugated interiors of these outpost dwellings, the film looks mythic, as much part of a legendary filmic past as its 1929, Northern Territory setting. And playing through without score, just precise and evocative sound design, from susurrating crickets to the hard, salty underfoot crunch of boots and hoofs on the desert plains, it feels both immersive and spartan. Like with all the greatest entries into this timeless genre, this is a compellingly simple story given space to breathe, perhaps even to howl out its elegy for long-ago crimes that still echo in the present day.

Thornton’s first film, the offbeat and moving love story “Samson and Delilah” which won the Camera d’Or in Cannes, announced the arrival of a talented filmmaker intent on giving voice to the stories of the underrepresented and marginalized Aboriginal population of Australia. But “Sweet Country” succeeds in its even loftier ambition of taking such a story and placing it within a mythical, archetypal cinematic tradition that makes it much bigger than itself, as big, in fact, as the landscape it inhabits, which is as hostile as it is beautiful and as vast as man’s capacity for cruelty. [A-]