Sweet Country

Synopsis: It’s the1920s and Northern Territory Aboriginal farmhand Sam Kelly (Hamilton Morris) goes on the run with his wife, Lizzie (Natassia Gorey Furber), after shooting a white man (Ewen Leslie). The local police sergeant (Bryan Brown) enlists the aid of a black tracker (Gibson John) and accompanied by Sam’s employer (Sam Neill) and another farmer (Thomas M. Wright) goes in pursuit.

Sweet Country is a superb-looking film.  It is also, unsurprisingly given that director Warwick Thornton is an indigenous Australian, a film very much concerned with the history (and present) of black-white relations in this country (in this respect, the title of the film is more than a little ironic). Thornton addressed this issue with great force in his 2009 feature film debut, Samson & Delilah, but whether this time around the Outback Western is the best vehicle for his interests is debatable.  

Whilst there is no question that Thornton, who also doubled as cinematographer, has delivered a very stylish film, there is a certain incongruity in packaging Australia’s racist colonial past in the trappings of the Western. Quentin Tarantino managed to do something similar in an American context with Django Unchained (2012) but there form and content worked seamlessly together. With Sweet Country we struggle to orient ourselves  The landscape is classic Australian Outback, the time is some years after WWI but the men dress like cowpokes and the local pub looks like a saloon.  John Hillcoat pulled off the Outback Western with The Proposition (2005) but he wasn’t making a serious-minded statement about race relations. On the other hand Rolf de Heer's The Tracker (2002) focussed on the historical aspect of those relations but he wasn’t co-opting the Western. Sweet Country tends to sit uneasily between its two stools - political history and genre film. Each aspect is strong on its own but together they work against each other, the outcome at times, particularly given the familiarity of the subject matter, feels unnecessarily protracted and emotionally remote.

Thornton mixes things up by using short flashbacks and flash-forwards that break up the narrative linearity although beyond this their purpose is not always clear. Thus, the film opens with an overhead shot of a pot boiling on a open fire while we hear the sounds of someone being physically beaten. It is a shot which is returned to later but I was not sure who was being beaten or why.

I was also a little frustrated by the character of Philomac (played by twins Tremayne and Trevon Doolan) in Steven McGregor and David Tranter’s script. Although he initially appears to be providing the classic child’s view of adult behaviour and has a pivotal role in the plot, his character is largely sidelined eventually disappearing altogether.  Also little used is Sam Neill as the voice of decency whilst Bryan Brown who as he grows old is looking more and more like Albert Tucker’s iconic Antipodean Head doesn’t look too convincing in a bobby’s uniform.

All this sounds like Sweet Country is a bit of a dud.  It isn’t. Rather it’s an ambitious, sophisticated film well worth seeing on the big screen even if it doesn’t quite resolve into a satisfying whole.

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