When news emerged that Justin Kurzel was to make a film based around the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, there was understandable unease in Tasmania. The mayor of the local council condemned the project. The state’s film funding body refused to contribute. The finished project will do little to win over those who object to its mere existence, but it is hard to imagine the material being more sensitively handled. Respectful in its treatment of the final carnage, psychologically nuanced without offering the perpetrator an ounce of sympathy, Nitram is a character study of the highest order.
Caleb Landry Jones’s victory in the best actor race at last year’s Cannes film festival was greeted with a degree of surprise. It now feels like the only sane choice. This is some challenge for the young Texan actor. The irascible, mentally unstable protagonist — a burden to those he loves — is based on a man who, with no apparent remorse, shot 35 people to death on the Australian island a quarter of a century ago. Shaun Grant’s script does not identify the character, only referring to him by the eponymous, derogatory nickname, but it seems as if the picture sticks reasonably closely to the real-life killer’s story. Nitram lives in tense disharmony with a brittle mother (Judy Davis) and a depressed father (Anthony LaPaglia) in a scratchy corner of Tasmania. He gains a modest sort of comfort when an eccentric heiress — the great Essie Davis treading in Grey Gardens territory — takes the wild, anarchically haired lad in and introduces him to her many dogs and to the pleasures of Gilbert and Sullivan. Two later crises push Nitram over the edge he has been skirting since adolescence.
To this point, Jones has spent his career veering from winning oddness to scenery-worrying excess. Kurzel has found the perfect role for his frantic, worried menace and, apparently bulking him up a tad, invited the actor to connect closely with solipsism at its most destructive. We first meet Nitram as a kid, in hospital after burning himself with fireworks. Years later, he is handing out rockets and Catherine wheels (his “friends”) to neighbouring schoolchildren. This is a man who feels himself immune from consequence. He seems to live forever in the moment. Others exist to satisfy his temporary needs.
The choice to place two generations of theatrical TNT in such close proximity counts as a masterpiece in the art of casting. Judy Davis has, from time to time, also been accused of emotional excess (shame on you). The fizzing potential energy between her and Jones – the mother largely suppressing fury that her son allows to emerge in increasingly destructive surges – could power whole cities. LaPaglia is scarcely less impressive as an old-school geezer unable to address his own insecurities.
Kurzel has travelled along a strange path. After a problematic Macbeth with Michael Fassbender, the inexplicable Assassin’s Creed with the same actor and the fine True History of the Kelly Gang, he here returns somewhere close to the unglamorous Australian misery of his breakthrough Snowtown. The film builds towards its catastrophe with masterful restraint. Germain McMicking’s cinematography operates in the same haze that befuddles Nitram’s brain. Jed Kurzel’s soundtrack (the director’s brother is among the busiest composer’s around) buzzes and throbs like a persistent insect. If it does nothing else, the film offers practical lessons in how to sustain suspense when headed inexorably towards a known destination.
Kurzel does, however, also have some sobering political and sociological arguments to make. The Dunblane massacre plays in the background as Nitram contemplates a trip to the gun store. A psychiatrist wonders if medication makes life “easier” for the patient or his parents. Closing lines of explanatory text offer some hope and some cynicism.
A remarkable piece of work.
