Wild Dogs Everywhere

Mystery RoadDirected by Ivan Sen
Four Stars

By Jonathan Fisher

Mystery Road doesn’t surrender its secrets readily. It is a difficult film to describe and review, because like other great thrillers of its ilk (Wake in Fright, Fargo) it functions on a number of planes. First and foremost, it is a murder mystery – its opening scene makes that clear. A truckie pulls over to the side of a deserted highway, checking his load. Perturbed by the ruffling of wild dogs, the truckie investigates a small underpass, and finds the mutilated body of a teenage Indigenous girl.

Shortly thereafter, we meet the film’s protagonist, Detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen), who has recently returned to his home town in isolated western Queensland after some time working in the city. He investigates the murder of the aforementioned Indigenous girl. He finds himself up against an intransigent local police force that would prefer to brush the whole thing under the carpet, as well as resentment in the Indigenous community when he questions the locals.

Complicating all of this is Jay’s ethnicity, you see – he is the sole Indigenous officer on the local force, in a community that clearly has a high Indigenous population. There is rancour, tension and of course racism between the whites and blacks in the town, and Jay is caught right in the middle of this. Mystery Road manages to incorporate the issue of race into its tale quietly, and its tone benefits from the fact that this aspect of the story isn’t shouted from the rooftops. It’s clear that racial tensions are fuelling most of the action in the story, and for the most part the movie lets the issue be, appreciating the toll it has taken on Swan and how it affects the choices he makes.  It isn’t overstated, which is often a risk in a film like this.

As the movie gets into the swing of things, it becomes clear that it has aspirations beyond being a straightforward whodunit. As with most modern cinema, it’s almost impossible to watch new movies without thinking about what they remind you of. Oh, that scene was a bit like a Coen Brothers scene; that shot is a bit like the one from the old Scorsese movie; isn’t this all a bit like LA Confidential? Most of modern cinema harks back to things that have come before – we live in the era of the pastiche. This poses a problem for modern cinema’s aesthetics. How can a movie stand on its own two feet if it is constantly reminding its audience of other, presumably better works?

I tried my hardest to draw comparisons between Mystery Road and other movies, but I gradually realised that most comparisons were superficial in nature. Yes, the black humour (and Mystery Road is very funny on occasion) is a little like a Coen Brothers picture. Yes, the overarching plot of a ‘good cop’ trying to beat the corrupt system to preserve justice is a bit like LA Confidential. And yes, many of the shots and sequences reminded me fleetingly of other directors. (interestingly, I found many shots and sequences of Mystery Road to be quite reminiscent of another Australian crime masterpiece from recent years: Animal Kingdom by David Michôd. Australian cinema, so vastly improved in recent years, now seems to be worth imitating)

Mystery Road is its own movie, and while it doesn’t quite maintain its focus and meanders every so often, for the most part it’s a viciously precise and thoughtful thriller. Aaron Pederson is Oscar-worthy as Jay Swan, and a host of supporting actors also inhabit their characters like a second skin. The film benefits from Ivan Sen’s directorial style, which is straightforward and considered. There are plenty of images that leave an imprint on the memory here – the recurring motif of the ‘bird’s eye view’ that intercuts scenes, even images as simple as Jay sitting solemnly in front of his dinner, considering his next move.

Sen is also adept at using simple, powerful signals to demonstrate Swan’s precarious position as an outsider to both the police force and his own community. One of the biggest ones is his car, a sturdy looking Holden. An Australian make, and a fine one – for the most part shiny and clean, a striking symbol of an upwardly mobile citizen. It drives others in the town, who aren’t so lucky, crazy. Swan’s ambivalence towards alcohol (which makes sense due to numerous hints about his prior proclivity to drink before entering the force) sets him apart from his loutish fellow officers. When his boss suggests they go for a drink to escape the bleating heat, Swan looks at his watch suspiciously, before we see him sipping an ice water. The optics of a 60-plus-year-old constable drinking beer in a country pub full of white people while on duty are far less damaging than a young Indigenous officer doing the same thing.

Lovely little moments like these abound in Mystery Road. It’s a smart movie, realistic about race relations, while also being aware of the need for its central murder mystery to work. The investigation is engrossing, and builds up to a finale that, while retaining the elgant and deliberate pacing of the rest of the film, is more visceral and exciting than most big studio cops and robbers movies we typically see. Mystery Road, by most measures, is a quiet masterpiece.

Adolescence is a Powerful Force

Carrie
Directed by Kimberly Peirce
Three Stars

By Rollan Schott

One of the interesting aspects of Brian De Palma’s “Carrie”, the 1976 horror classic about repressed sexuality and the power of femininity, was that it was written (novel and screenplay) and directed by men. It’s an odd band to be writing a feminist anthem, but what De Palma’s “Carrie” became, amidst the whir of testosterone involved in the production, was a parable about the Darwinian cruelty of high school and, perhaps more importantly, a paranoid allegory of masculine insecurity, of the buried power of the women that a male-centric society dares to subjugate. It worked both as a sardonic revenge fantasy and as a cautionary tale, and felt all the more dangerous and startling for managing both.

White Privilege Around the African Horn

Captain Phillips
Directed by Paul Greengrass
Two and One Half Stars

By Rollan Schott

Paul Greengrass' "Captain Phillips" is a taught, well-written thriller about a wholesome white cargo ship captain standing strong in the face of ruthless black pirates. I am not sure this is a movie we need. Indeed it is difficult for a film like this not to be about race in at least some capacity, not in an increasingly progressive American society that is paying more and more attention to the casual racism infecting the most visible cadres of popular culture. Greengrass doesn't seem to mind this being the underlying subject here, but his visceral, combative approach doesn't allow space for the principal dichotomies necessaries to give it any weight.

A Tale Told too Quickly

Rush
Directed by Ron Howard
Two Stars

By Jonathan Fisher

Ron Howard’s Rush, a sports drama focusing on the famous rivalry in the 1970s between F1 drivers Niki Lauda and James Hunt, is a shiny product that clearly has high production values and an experienced hand behind the camera. Most of the technical aspects of this movie are first rate, including the performances of the two leads by Daniel Bruhl (who, so many years ago, was wonderful in Goodbye Lenin!) and Chris Hemsworth. There are driving sequences aplenty, and for the most part they’re easy to follow and enjoyable, with an added dramatic twist in that we know that F1 racing in the 1970s was far more dangerous than it is today, with the prospect of serious accident or death hanging over the competitors every time they sat behind the wheel.

Money is a Foreign Language

Blue Jasmine
Directed by Woody Allen
Four Stars

By Rollan Schott

And so, here at age 77, Woody Allen has made one of the great films of his long career, and has drawn from Cate Blanchett one of the great comic performances by anyone. Allen has always predicated his films on the vast chasm over which people from different circumstances attempt to understand one another. His time has come. With income inequality in America as wide as it has been since the twenties, our public discourse has shifted toward attempts by both the rich and the poor to pigeon-hole and typecast the other. Class warfare has no place for humanity.

The Pantheon (2013)

Citizen Kane, 1942, Dir. by Orson Welles

Retired Entries
- The Third Man (Reed, 49)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 68)

Jon's Picks
Rollie's Picks

1. Citizen Kane (Welles, 42) +2
2. Rear Window (Hitchcock, 54) +3
3. City Lights (Chaplin, 31) +1
4. Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 76) +11
5. Goodfellas (Scorsese, 90) +5
6. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 28) Even
7. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 58) +2
8. Psycho (Hitchcock, 60) -1
9. 12 Angry Men (Lumet, 57) +14
10. Stalker (Tarkovsky, 79) -2 

The Horror of the Endless Quiet

Gravity
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
Four Stars

By Jonathan Fisher

“I hate space.”

So says medical engineer Ryan Stone in Gravity. And well she may. Innately, all humans are. Of course, it’s quite humbling to stand down here on terra firma, watch a few episodes of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and look up at the night sky, the uncountable distant galaxies and far away suns. The reality of existence in space, however, is another thing. Space is empty. Think about that concept. Empty. No atmosphere, no sound, certainly no life apart from what we have flung up there in spacesuits designed to mimic the conditions under which we can survive. No sign, as Sagan once said, of help from elsewhere coming to save us from ourselves.

That innate discomfort humans have with space is what Gravity is about, and we the audience instinctively understand that, which is why this movie is such a white-knuckle experience. This film explores, to coin a phrase by Neil DeGasse Tyson, the many ways in which the universe is trying to kill us. Sandra Bullock is Ryan Stone, who along with astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and a small crew is in orbit around Earth, on a mission to repair the Hubble telescope. Kowalksi and Stone are really the only two characters we get to know in the early going – Kowalski as a playful flirt and experienced astronaut, Stone as an uptight engineer with little experience in the vacuum. Kowalski, Stone and a third astronaut are on a spacewalk when disaster strikes.

A nearby Russian satellite self-destructs, and a storm of space debris (yes, this movie also acts as something of a commentary on the little-understood problem of space junk) flies towards our heroes’ space station. In the initial blitz, the third colleague on the spacewalk is killed, and the space station’s hull is compromised, killing another two crew members. This means Kowalksi and Stone are alone in the emptiness of space, communications with Houston severed, with nothing but malfunctioning human-made technology to help them get home. Oh, how our cleverness and self-proclaimed genius pales when faced with the empty horror of life outside our blue planet.

Gravity is directed by Alfonso Cuaron, who previously directed the excellent Children of Men as well as the third instalment of the Harry Potter series. His is an elegant, unhurried directorial style, and Gravity is better for it. Cuaron is an eminently visual director, and it’s remarkable how engrossing he makes a simple sequence of Stone taking off her space suit when she, at last, reaches an airlock. (there’s also, I think, a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey in the framing of the final, beautiful shot in that sequence as Stone falls asleep)

The action set pieces are tense and horrifying; Cuaron lingers on just how little control our heroes have in this harsh environment. He also focuses on the shared humanity of these two astronauts, which forms the core of Gravity’s emotional punch. We don’t get to know either character all that well, but we gain a basic understanding of what they’re all about, and when it comes down to it, they’re likable. That’s important in a movie like this – Gravity wouldn’t have worked nearly as well if the last bastions of humanity in this disaster were a pair of jerks.

Gravity is probably the strongest of the science-fiction films of 2013 thus far. It doesn’t present a stylistic and creative vision of a dystopian future. It isn’t wall-to-wall with special effects that call attention to themselves. It allows space for the instinctive fear of what exists outside our tenuous atmosphere, while also airing our sense of humility – when Kowalski is faced with his fate, spinning helplessly in orbit, he – visible to us as a mere speck of a homo sapien set against the vast emptiness of space and the enormity of Earth – remarks on the beautiful sunset over the Ganges.

Gravity is in some ways one of the least showy science fiction movies in recent memory, but also one of the most audacious. It is set essentially in the here and now, focuses on a realistic set of parameters and problems astronauts could be faced with, and seeks to explore a powerful question – outside of a planet that we have become masters of (and are poisoning as fast as we can with a kind of perverse glee), how do we humans reconcile our timidity in the face of a vast, powerful and indifferent universe?