In his Vietnam War quasi-memoir “The Things We Carried,” writer Tim O’Brien posits the idea that a storyteller must exercise a measure of creative license to accurately capture the essence of history. He theorizes an “emotional truth,” a close relative of Werner Herzog’s so-called “ecstatic truth,” under which the account of events may be tampered with in order to more expressionistically replicate the experience of being there. Peter Carey subscribed to that very notion with his 2000 novel “True History of the Kelly Gang,” which freely rearranged the details surrounding 19th-century Australian bushranger Ned Kelly to mold his living self into the larger-than-life figure that his legacy suggests today. Carey ginned up a wife and a child, a letter to whom frames the text, to make immediately palpable what would only become clear in his subject’s posthumous future: the soul of Australian settler identity rested on Kelly’s broad Irish shoulders.
Justin Kurzel’s new film adaptation depicts the robber, raider, cop-killer, and general hellraiser in all the outlaw glory that posterity has assigned him. Kurzel’s prismatic view of Kelly’s life and times goes to gnarlier and more vivid places than superficially similar period pieces. First, however, we join Kelly as a timid little boy (Orlando Shwerdt) cowering before the lecherous brutes that come by to pay his mother (Essie Davis) to service them. The film will soon bear witness to the formative events that vulcanized him from a humble Point A to a heroic Point B, a life short enough for a biopic to comfortably cover the whole of its breadth.
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But the particulars of that evolution, one that Kelly undergoes reluctantly until his adult years (in which George Mackay takes up the role), pose an interrogation to Kurzel and Carey’s own efforts at cultural mythmaking. Kelly’s auto-critical portraiture has more in common with “Jackie,” another film about an icon in spite of themselves, accepting the burden of importance that their time has placed on them. The Irish, manacled by their English overlords and shipped off to the Oceanic penal colony en masse, needed a leader. Kelly simply agreed to play the part that had already been developed for him.
And a meaty role it was; Kelly and his legion of rapscallions designed their reputation to precede them, charging into firefights clad in women’s dresses or crude suits of metal armor to throw off their enemies. They came to embody a new generation of Australian’s cardinal values: self-sufficiency, strength, and an undying hatred for the colonialist oppressors. After watching the bastards exterminate the aborigines and getting the sense their Irish brethren might be next, Kelly’s posse had some choice words for the English — almost all of them four letters, and most beginning with C. The preening, superior class gets a pair of embodiments, first in a brutish sergeant (Charlie Hunnam) and then in an effete constable (Nicholas Hoult) haranguing Kelly’s young wife (Thomasin Mackenzie). The Irish loathing for their UK neighbors comes to define their entire outlook on the world, driving a protagonist to revenge regardless of the self-destructive toll it exacts.
Kurzel’s film celebrates Australia itself, as a lawless place with all the stirring raw potential of the American frontier, as much as it celebrates Kelly. Aerial shots glide over natural Outback expanses, where wraithlike bare trees eerily dot the endless tracts of flatland. This is a hostile sort of beauty, the national equivalent of a face only a mother could love, and Kelly loves it with all of his heart. No matter how many times he sets out into civilization to make a life for himself, at one early point entering the tutelage of bushranger predecessor Harry Power (Russell Crowe) in Melbourne, he always drifts back to the untamed wilds. He cannot deny his true nature, that of a Kelly and a displaced Irishman, in both cases a rouser of rabble.
Like Carey’s novel, Kurzel’s film considers itself a corrective work, reclaiming Kelly as an Australian from the English shapers of his memory. In a flourish of historicity-bending that could be fairly described as Tarantino-esque, the authors erase Kelly’s infamous yet dubiously reported final words of “Such is life” and replace them with a defiant silence. In doing so, they take a modern view of the past as a fluctuating thing that changes along with our understanding of it. The refusal to accept the official record as fixed and immutable plants this film in 2019 as much as the visceral run-and-gun photography of the bloodsoaked grand finale. The symbolic entity currently recognized as Ned Kelly exists somewhere between then and the re-interpretive now, between humanity and superhumanity, between facts and the truth. [B+]
