→ February 27, 2025
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Memoir of a Snail.

Memoir of a Snail is almost too much of a bad thing: Its protagonist, Grace, suffers tragedy after tragedy in her life, confirming her fears about the world to the point that she’s left entirely alone as the film begins and she starts telling her life story. It is so beautifully told, however, that it holds itself together just long enough to get to the finish line, where it all comes together in an ending that brings hope with just a touch of sentiment. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Nominated for this year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, Memoir of a Snail is the second full-length film from writer/director Adam Elliot, who apparently has a reputation for these sort of bleak stories. It follows Grace Pudel (voiced by Sarah Snook), who we see as an adult at the beginning, watching her closest friend, Pinky (Jacki Weaver), die of the most old age. Grace then steps outside to the garden, where she releases one of her pet snails, Sylvia, and then begins to tell the sad story of her sad life, from her birth with a cleft lip, for which other kids make fun of her for years, to when she and her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) became orphans – their mother died giving birth to them – and then their miserable lives in separate foster families. Gilbert ends up with an evangelical Christian family near Perth, where he’s forced to work on the family orchard and to speak in tongues while praying, while Grace ends up with a pair of nudist hippies who eventually just abandon her. Her life gets worse and worse, other than her friendship with the eccentric Pinky, who buried two husbands in tragicomic circumstances, but has a devil-may-care approach to life and is determined to have a good time.

Pinky’s death is, naturally, the spur that Grace needs to leave the house and go live her life for the first time, although how we get there is part of the magic of the film. There’s probably one tragedy too many – one of them definitely had me shout “enough!” at the screen – but there is so much exploration of Grace’s feelings that she ends up one of the best-developed characters in any film this year, live-action or animated. It also means that when she gets a happier ending, the film has earned it, even the one slightly implausible bit (which you will probably see coming) that makes her happiest of all of her new fortunes.

Elliotuses stop-motion animation in his films, with a style that naturally calls to mind Tim Burton’s work in the genre, with elements of Charles Addams and Edward Gorey in his characters’ appearances. They’re cute in a grotesque sort of way, especially Grace with her ridiculous snail-hat (it has two ping-pong balls on wires or pipe cleaners, painted as eyes) and Gilbert with his Harry Potter-ish hair. They’re weird, and that makes it easy to see why they’d be bullied and ostracized, and why they’d feel alone and scared of the greater world. It’s also easy to empathize with them, and root for them in their Dickensian circumstances, because he depicts them as real enough to keep them from becoming pathetic. Snook’s voice performance is also fantastic, so much so that she won Best Lead Actress at this year’s AACTA Awards, the Australian equivalent to the Oscars, with Weaver winning for Best Supporting Actress, both over actors who appeared in live-action films.

Best Animated Feature is the only category in this year’s Oscars where I’ve seen all of the nominees, and that’ll probably still be true on Sunday night. I expect Flow to win, as it won the Golden Globe and won the Best Animated Feature – Independent award at the Annies (the most significant awards for animated productions), but this isn’t even a close call; Flow is fine, but has no dialogue and very little story, just some beautiful animation work and a bunch of animals who turn out to secretly be civil engineers. It would be my second choice, with The Wild Robot third, Inside Out 2 second, and the very disappointing Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl last, because it just wasn’t funny at all.

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→ August 10, 2020
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The True History of the Kelly Gang (film).

I enjoyed Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel The True History of the Kelly Gang when I read it ten years ago, but the new film adaptation of the book, released briefly to theaters this spring by IFC Films (now available via amazon), is a huge disappointment. It bears little resemblance to the book, revels in pointless violence, and makes use of some confusing camera tricks that left me with the impression that the filmmakers were more impressed by their technical ideas than they were concerned with making the film comprehensible.

Ned Kelly is a real historical figure, a bushranger and outlaw in 1800s Australia who has become a sort of Robin Hood-style folk hero in the century-plus since his capture and execution. He was born to an Irishman who was forcibly transported to Australia as a convict, and fell in with horse thieves before a violent confrontation at his family house with a Constable named Fitzpatrick led to Ned shooting the Constable and taking flight. He stayed on the run for two years with a ‘gang’ of fellow outlaws, gaining sympathizers across the continent due to antipathy towards the English or distrust of the corrupt colonial police, before he was caught and arrested in a shootout and conflagration that led to the death of Ned’s brother, several hostages, and a 13-year-old boy. Ned was tried and hanged for the murder of one of the officers who had been hunting for him, whom Kelly and his comrades ambushed at Stringybark Creek.

Carey’s novel follows the true story of Ned Kelly fairly closely, at least at the level of macro events, but this film goes its own way, inventing new events out of whole cloth, often to try to amp up the violence or depravity of the story. More than half of its two hours pass before Kelly (played by George Mackay) goes on the run, which happens earlier in the book and opens the door to most of the action in the story. The film dwells too long on Kelly’s upbringing, overdramatizing his tutelage under the bushranger Harry Power (Russell Crowe), then dropping the latter with a one-sentence narration, and jumping ahead in time to show Ned getting out of jail for a crime he committed under Harry’s direction. There’s a lot of underexplanation in this film, and knowing the book or the real story of Ned Kelly isn’t a lot of help because the script deviates so far from both.

The movie has Dan Kelly, Ned’s brother, and his fellow horse-thief Steve wearing fancy dresses on their escapades, a disguise that Ned adopts as well for his gang – something that appears to be pure invention on the part of the screenwriters. The film also implies multiple times that Ned and his friend Joe Byrne were lovers, which doesn’t seem to derive from any historical evidence at all. There’s also a brothel where Ned first meets Fitzpatrick, who later tries to woo his sister; the wooing is true but the house appears to be a fabrication, one that appears multiple times in the story.

The one shining light in the movie is Nicholas Hoult, who plays Fitzpatrick with a sort of disturbing yet genteel charm, although this again doesn’t appear to match the historical record. The real Alexander Fitzpatrick was only a Constable for three years, was a longtime alcoholic, and had a reputation for arresting and charging men on dubious pretenses – such as spiking Ned Kelly’s drink and then arresting him for drunk and disorderly conduct, a probably true story that would actually have made for a good scene in this film. Hoult plays Fitzpatrick less as a lush and more as a proud yet unscrupulous man, one whom you could understand Ned briefly befriending and young women possibly admiring. You might know Hoult as the boy in About a Boy, but he came to my notice more recently in 2018’s The Favourite, where he played the only male character of any substance in the film, a foppish dandy of sorts whom Hoult played to the hilt.

Mackay, unfortunately, plays Ned as a bestial figure, one devoid of nearly all personality or reason; it’s unclear why anyone would follow this madman, let alone why he’d eventually become a folk hero whose legacy is still debated to this day in Australia. Mackay was very good in 1917 and a pleasant surprise in the uneven Captain Fantastic, but this script did nothing to make use of his talents. Dismissive of its main character’s complexity, obsessed instead with pointlessly graphic violence, and shot in eccentric ways, The True History of the Kelly Gang does a disservice to its protagonist and to the book from which it came.

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→ January 4, 2019
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Sweet Country.

The Australian film Sweet Country, now free on amazon prime, swept the AACTA Awards, that country’s equivalent to our Oscars, last month, taking home Best Film, Best Direction, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, and a Best Lead Actor prize for first-time actor Hamilton Morris, capping off a sixteen-month run that saw it win major awards in Toronto and Venice as well as Best Feature Film at the Asia-Pacific Screen Awards. It’s a beautiful film to watch with expansive scenes of the northwestern Australian landscape, with a simple, timeless story of racial injustice that could have just as easily been set in the United States.

The details set the plot apart a bit, but the framework is familiar: A black man kills a white man in self-defense, flees, and is then tried for murder, with the gallows already built for him before the trial begins. Sam, played by Morris, is the black (aboriginal) man here, a hired hand for the Christian farmer Fred Smith (Sam Neill), who lends Sam and his wife Lizzie (Natassia Gorey-Furber, nominated for an AACTA for Best Supporting Actress) to their new neighbor, a disturbed, volatile war veteran named Harry March. While there for the day, Sam follows Harry’s directions to go do something away from the house, a pretext for Harry to rape Lizzie. On a later day, Harry borrows another hired hand and an aboriginal youth named Philomac, only to chain the kid up on suspicion of theft. When Philomac flees, a drunk Harry goes to Fred’s house looking for him, shooting down the door, after which Sam shoots him dead in self-defense and then takes flight across the outback.

Most of the action in Sweet Country takes place in that first act, which is followed by the extended search for Sam and Lizzie in act two, showing both pursuers and fugitives as they move across territory that is hostile in more ways than one; and then the trial in act three, where a young, progressive judge gives Sam a fair trial despite unfriendly locals and the racist sergeant who led the chase to capture him. Part of director Warwick Thornton’s achievement is weaving them seamlessly into one film despite massive, abrupt shifts in both tone and tempo. The first third is full of (Hannah Gadsby voice) tension, the second contrasts this gorgeous scenery with the injustice of the hunt for Sam and the knowledge that the desert could kill any of these men, and the third becomes an ad hoc courtroom drama without the courtroom, as the trial takes place in the street due to the lack of a town hall in the remote outpost where it occurs. They could play out as three different films, just sharing characters, but Thornton, working from a screenplay by David Tranter and Steven McGregor, keeps the narrative and pace together enough so the entire film can work as a unified piece. That plays out in surprising ways, especially during the trial where the tension comes from silence as much as it does from the revelations during testimony.

Sweet Country is a slow film in many ways, at least in contrast to the pace of most big-studio American releases, and probably would look even better on a big screen where the cinematography would play up, with the second act showing the variety of landscapes and climate types across the northern part of Western Australia. It’s also lighter on dialogue than mainstream films until the trial commences, which is why my attention started to drift during the middle third of the film. I especially appreciated Thornton’s decision to cloak the rape scene in complete darkness; while it would still likely trigger some people by sound, the entire sequence is pitch black on the screen. If you’ve even read the description here of the plot, you can probably guess the film’s ending, although it’s still powerful for the reactions of the characters rather than any real sense of surprise – and again feels timeless for its depiction of a black man trying to find justice in a white man’s world.

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