Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Leah Purcell, Rob Collins, Sam Reid, Jessica De Gouw, Benedict Hardie, Harry Greenwood, Nicholas Hope
Intro:
... robust storytelling ...
Given the long and vexed (and unfinished) history of dispossession and myth making that is the colonial legacy, it is not surprising that it would take a complete reimagining to bring some balance back into the account. In fact, as multi-talented actor/writer/director Leah Purcell has done here, it requires a kind of reverse bias.
In her new sort of ‘outback Western’, she has taken a story by that most colonial writer Henry Lawson and turned it on its head. Purcell (best known perhaps for her many TV roles) plays the eponymous Molly Johnson, the Drover’s wife surviving in a log cabin with her clutch of scraggy little nippers in a dust-dry region of the high country. When an Aboriginal man called Yadaka (a brooding, handsome Rob Collins) arrives fleeing the law, Molly greets him as she does every stranger with her shotgun held high. Every fibre in the bush woman’s body is devoted to protecting her brood, but Yadaka gets on her good side, befriending and mentoring her young son Jimmy.
Meanwhile, in the struggling-to-be born local town, a Sergeant Klintoff (Sam Reid) arrives with his wife Louisa to take up the post of local sheriff. The rest of the film plays out the bloody logic and rough justice of the colonial era with no shortage of shootouts and sexual assaults.
Purcell has done a decent job directing and the wide open spaces are nicely contrasted to the claustrophobia of the way Molly’s life is hemmed in by the era’s gendered expectations. The acting is committed and the dialogue (also by Purcell) is fit for purpose. The story is simple and clear enough and doesn’t need much exposition.
As a proud Aboriginal person, Purcell is keen to foreground the racial injustice aspects as well as the nascent feminist agenda (although perhaps Louisa, the sheriff’s wife, is the least well-written role).
Whereas in Lawson’s settler perspective, the Indigenous are seen as lazy, devious or untrustworthy, here they are noble and wise. Purcell is clearly enjoying the role (she originated it on the stage) and she throws herself into it in every frame. The trope of the ‘vixen’ defending her cubs is familiar but still powerful (even the poster has Molly standing proud with her trusty gun very much to the fore).
Perhaps for some, there will be an element of a moral sledgehammer about the messaging. All the white men (with the possible exception of the confused well-meaning sheriff) are either pious hypocrites or deranged psychopathic rapists. The indigenous characters are persecuted, noble and caring. This shouldn’t detract from the robust storytelling and the heartfelt and righteous anger that had audiences cheering out loud at its premiere screening.
