Many years ago, I read a novel called The English Patient. The novel was interesting and, on just about every page, there was some specimen of lyrical writing that was breathtaking. But, for some reason, the entire enterprise, including its punctuation marks and conjunctions, rang false to me. The book displayed all sorts of extreme situations but none of it made any real sense. (Later, the novel by Michael Ondaatje was made into a movie that won many awards and was similarly beautiful, but wholly unconvincing.) The English Patient was a brilliant conceived "artifact", but it wasn't "art." I have a similar reaction to a recent (2019) film about the infamous bushranger Ned Kelly, The True History of the Kelly Gang. As directed by Justin Kurzel, the film is full of startling imagery, hallucinations, and lurid violence. The picture looks great and the acting is splendid, but, somehow, the grotesque events depicted don't really cohere. A lot of what we see on screen is, apparently, true but the movie's weird emphasis on the sexual perplexity of the title character undercuts the enterprise and, ultimately, turns the film into a sort of gratuitous freak-show. This is an ambitious picture and worth seeing, but I don't think it succeeds.
The movie depicts Ned Kelly's career as an outlaw ("bushranger") and would-be rebel in three extended acts: these are signaled by graffiti etched into scraps of wood or metal -- Boy, Man, Monitor. The last word refers to the iron-clad warship, the Monitor, that was deployed in the American Civil War and, that, according to the film was the inspiration for Kelly's exploits wearing plate armor late in his career. (Images of Kelly striding around in a towering metal helmet with iron strapped around his body are iconic in Australia -- one of the first films ever produced on that continent was an account of Kelly's banditry shot in 1906, 26 years after the outlaw's execution. Mick Jagger played Kelly in 1970 movie and, it seems, that about every decade the story is retold. Peter Carey won the Man Booker prize in 2001 for the True History of the Kelly Gang, the novel on which the 2019 movie is based. Sydney Nolan, one of Australia's greatest painters, was famous for pictures of Kelly in his famous ploughshare armor stalking about the landscape.) The "Boy" section of the movie shows Kelly as an angelic, blonde little boy. The film starts with a dimly perceived episode of Kelly's mother giving a blow job to a local constable -- she runs a shebeen in a desolate, burned-out forest in Victoria Province. (Her little shack in the midst of a vast tract of charred trees make as much sense as the log cabins of John Ford's pioneers crouched in the sand and rock under the buttes of Monument Valley). Kelly saves a local lad from drowning and the boy's mother wants to pay for his education, but Kelly's monstrous mother refuses -- they are shanty Irish and proud and she doesn't want her boy educated by the English. Kelly discovers that his father, also apparently a bushranger and horse rustler, has the habit of wearing women's evening gowns during his nocturnal exploits. Kelly's father is feckless and, when the family runs out of food, the little boy kills a beef cow and drags a quarter of the animal back to the home. (This sequence is surreal and reminds me a bit of the dream in Bunuel's Los Olvidados in which a young boy dreams of his mother and meat). Kelly's father is accused of the cattle theft, hauled off to the gaol by the constable who has been enjoying his mother's favors, and, later, dies in custody. Kelly's loving mother than sells the boy for 15 pounds to a vicious bushranger, Harry Powers (played by a fat and very dissolute-looking Russell Crowe). Powers exploits the boy but, also, teaches him how to rob stagecoaches and commit murders. Powers corners the constable in a local brothel and orders Kelly to shoot off the man's penis. Kelly refuses, deserts Powers (who ends up in custody), and returns home to his mother's tavern/whorehouse, the shack in the charred forest -- he's been gone for ten years.
In the "Man" section of the film, we see Kelly's encounters with another local constable (The cops are all British; the people living in shacks are Irish --the aboriginal population is nowhere to be seen.) Kelly's mother has taken up with a cowboy from California. At a brothel, Kelly falls in love with a local whore who has a baby. Kelly's mother interferes with the relationship -- she seems to want her oldest son for herself. There's a fight and Kelly shoots the constable in the wrist. Kelly flees into the bush with his brothers and forms a gang. After a massacre of cops, Kelly's mother is arrested and taken to Melbourne where she is put behind bars for three years. The constable menaces Kelly's "son" with his gun to get the mother to admit to the outlaw's whereabouts -- she refuses. The final section, "Monitor" details Kelly's gathering of an army with the intent of staging a raid on a police train, killing large numbers of constables, and, then, leading his rebels into Melbourne to rescue his mother. Kelly forges armor and his men train wearing the metal gear. A number of hostages are taken and, cloaked in white sack-like hoods, kept in a room in a schoolhouse. Kelly talks to the schoolmaster and shows the man his diary in which he is writing for his son (Mary's bastard child) the "true history of the Kelly gang." The schoolmaster praises the diary and says that he would like to be released, for just five minutes, to get some books to lend to Kelly. Kelly, an avid reader, lets the man loose and he immediately betrays the gang. A big group of cops clad in weird white ski-outfits attacks the shed and shoots it to pieces, Kelly emerges in his armor, takes a couple hundred rounds, but ends up fallen to the ground and, apparently, as helpless as a turtle in his heavy metal gear. He' s taken to Melbourne where he spends a tender hour or so with his mother (the scene has quasi-incestuous overtones) and, then, is hanged. In a final scene, the schoolmaster, I think, addresses parliament and says that the Australians are unfortunate in choosing bushrangers like Kelly for their heroes. A final title tells us that Kelly, as an Irish Catholic, wanted his body buried in consecrated ground -- but this wish was denied. This ending is a nod to contemporary events -- Kelly's bones were moved about here and there, displayed as curiosities, and not finally buried in church soil until 2012 (after DNA testing established the identity of his remains.).
The film is utterly bizarre in its grotesque psycho-sexual imagery. The opening scene showing fellatio is rhymed with a later sequence involving someone's corpse hanging from a tree with his genitals rammed into his mouth. Kelly's rebels all wear evening gowns to their battles. The bushrangers all cross-dress. There are strange scenes of men embracing and sleeping together. The physical habitus of the male characters is exaggeratedly stiff and "armored" -- men pose with their chests bulging outward, muscles flexed, legs spread with knees stoutly upraised. It's as if the film were designed as some kind of elaboration on the ideas of Wilhelm Reich -- these soldier warriors are armored against orgasm, implicitly homosexual, and, always, sashaying around in filmy low-cut evening gowns. Kelly's relationship with his feral mother is quasi-incestuous. The reason men have to be armored is because the bush is deadly, full of thorns and charred trees, and the men are soft bags of blood prone to bursting and spraying gore everywhere. Kelly's agonized sexuality recalls Paul Newman's performance as Billy the Kid in Arthur Penn's The Left-handed Gun (adapted from a play outing the Kid written by no less than Gore Vidal. For some reason, many sequences are staged in the snow -- I have to admit that I had no idea that it snowed anywhere in Australia. The shanties look like steel containers but ,when attacked by rifle fire, their walls simply disintegrate -- what looks like steel can't protect the people inside. The final fifteen minutes of the film is hallucinatory. The hostages look like Klansmen from a Philip Guston painting -- they have big ornate hoods over their heads. And the attacking police form an abstract string like Christmas tree lights ; they are also dressed like Klansmen in white get-ups, as they blast away at the hapless bushrangers. Camerawork features jerky handheld sequences, footages, in some instance, apparently shot with something like a wobbly selfy-stick, and elaborate drone shots. The dialogue is difficult to decipher due to the odd lingo and heavy Australian accents -- on several occasions, the cross-dressing rabble of bushrangers led by Kelly is referred with words that I heard as "The Sons of Steve". Undoubtedly, I heard wrong.
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