Ivan Sen 2013 Australia
Starring: Aaron Pedersen, Hugo Weaving, Ryan Kwanten, Tony Barry, Tasma Walton, Damian Walshe-Howling, David Field, Zoe Carides, Jack Charles
Ivan Sen's outback western Mystery Road starts off innocuously enough in the dark with a trucker stopping his rig at night after hearing a noise. The grass is green, the sky is burnt orange and the humour is black. Arming himself with a tire iron the man checks his vehicle then follows the sounds until he eventually finds the body of a young woman huddled in a tunnel beneath the road, flies buzzing about the wound across her throat. Scared out of his wits he flashes the blue light of his torch on a road sign that reads Massacre Creek. Soon the police arrive then Detective Jay Swan, a native trained in the city but now returned to rural Queensland and apparently the only non-corrupt cop in town. Swan rides up in a white hat (but a black car), seemingly an identifier of which side he's on. The most important colour however concerns that of his skin and the origins of the blood in his veins. He's of Aboriginal descent and even in modern-day Australia that means he's viewed with a mixture of mildly patronising reverence (at having risen so high in the ranks) and suspicion by both his white colleagues and the citizens of the neighbourhood he grew up in. Even a child who he gets information from asks him "we kill coppers, don't we" before cutting a deal in which Jay will let him hold his gun. He's both a local and an outsider, stateless, refused help on the case he's been given to keep him out of the way because "one war at a time is all we can afford". Nevertheless his real intent remains elusive. When his former girlfriend (intensely played by a quietly feisty Tasma Walton) tells him "at least I know who I am" you can see what she's getting at. Is he Clint Eastwood killing the villains because it's the only way to stop them even if he has die in the process? Or is he James Stewart, the warm sheriff with a history arriving from the wider world to clean up a small town? Unfortunately by the end of the film it's still not that obvious. Several reviews have derided Sen's knowing use of genre as nothing more than cliché. The crucial thing about cliché though is that, like stereotype, it can have a basis in truth, particularly when it's done well. Sometimes Sen pulls it off, sometimes he doesn't, but the ever-present theme is that almost every time a formulaic plot twist appears he transcends it as if he's fully aware of the implications of his choices. At one point for example Jay is revealed to have issues with alcohol just as a thousand policemen, cowboys and miscellaneous others have before him but when he buys a case of beer he doesn't fall off the wagon as might be expected, he lines the bottles up on fenceposts and uses them for target practice. Similarly another oft-used development involving Jay's past is improved no end by the performances (a short look of disgust from Aaron Pedersen is especially stunning) and when Jay's shifty colleague Johnno attempts to intimidate him asking whether he's ever killed anyone and if he would if he could get away with it both men change direction several times and make it interesting. It helps that the actor playing Johnno is Hugo Weaving, a fine if underrated presence, and here as elsewhere his muted power eclipses each of his co-stars in mere minutes of screen time. A bigger problem lies in Sen's sloppily plotted script and its illogical ending. It has some admittedly excellent quotable moments ("He had a smile on him like a shot fox") but on the whole it tends to fall down, at a couple of points even setting up events and details then forgetting to tie them up. In terms of direction Sen has obvious talent and the film has enough positives to be engaging but I can only hope that next time he lets someone else handle the writing. Even a co-author would do.
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