‘It’s Angry, Urgent, Important’: Why You Need To See The New Adam Goodes Documentary

THE AUSTRALIAN DREAM

★★★1/2

As much as Daniel Gordon’s Stan Grant-penned picture is an intimate documentary portrait of the life and times of legendary Swans footballer Adam Goodes, it’s also somewhat of a cinematic Trojan horse. A documentary staring headlong at Australia’s dark history — and dispiriting present — of systemic racism may be a hard sell for some cinemagoers, but The Australian Dream can be sold as something else entirely: a movie about football.

If this secular country has a major religion, it’s footy. And, thus, the story of Goodes can be told within the parameters of something friendly, familiar, non-threatening. Sure, Grant’s poetic monologues may speak of the horrifying history of colonialist invasion and ethnic cleansing, but there’s also the story of sporting success.

There’s tales of that kid who loved kicking a ball, the video archive sight of a dashing centre half forward kicking six goals as a 17-year-old in an under-18s Grand Final, the young talent’s transformation into Brownlow medallist, premiership player, and, in what normally cements a footballer as an indisputable legend, someone who played through pain/injury in a grand final (cue: stereotypes about warriors, the beloved narrative of triumph over adversity, etc).

By first humanising this sportsman, creating empathy with his experience, the turn that comes in his late career years is made to truly hit home. When, in 2015, Goodes calls out a racist slur from a young Collingwood supporter, he’s charged as a bully; the backlash against his stand steeped in the shameless ratings-chasing of inflammatory right wing media and the toxic entitlement of internet outrage. Goodes’ steadfast defiance turns him into a figure of great terror for conservative White Australia: Goodes becoming, as Grant pointedly puts it, the ‘angry Aborigine’.

Where Ian Darling’s contemporaneous Goodes documentary, The Final Quarter, is an in-the-moment chronicle of this period of media hysteria, The Australian Dream is a determinedly big picture doc. Whilst Goodes’ story sits at its centre, it’s as much about Grant’s interrogation of Australian history; from its genocidal past to the ongoing horrors of this country’s treatment of its First Nations peoples. It’s a film about a footballer that touches on the Stolen Generation, assimilation policies, and the great national shame of Australia Day (“we don’t celebrate the holocaust,” Goodes himself reasons).

This isn’t a documentary meant to just haunt film festivals; even though it just opened the Melbourne International Film Festival, and won the Audience Award there. It’s meant to be seen far and wide across this country, across age ranges and social divisions. The Australian Dream uses the accessibility of the AFL to talk about the national trauma, and shame, of this nation’s violent founding. It’s angry, urgent, important. And the great hope of Grant and Goodes is obviously for the film to foster greater conversation.

THE NIGHTINGALE

★★★★

Jennifer Kent’s long-awaited Babadook follow-up also stares headlong at Australia’s troubling history, its unaddressed traumas, and the lingering stigmas of racism. Sometimes quite literally. In moments of intimacy, and formalism, that break from — and through — its overland periodpiece adventure, Kent employs direct-to-camera frontality, the down-the-barrel gaze of its characters verily interrogating its audience.

Those staring at camera/viewer are two figures representing groups traditionally excluded from the narrative of Australian history: Billy (Baykali Ganambarr), a First Nations tracker; and Clare (Aisling Franciosi), an Irish convict whose won ‘freedom’, in 1825 colonial Van Diemen’s Land, is spent under the yoke of servitude. Their outsiderdom is effectively spoken aloud in the moments in which they speak in their own tongues: Billy, in the nearly-extinct First Nations dialect Palawa Kani; Clare in Gaelic.

The third key figure in the drama is another symbol. Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin) is a high ranking English officer, upper class enough to command a high position, entitled enough to take whatever he wishes as his due. His curdled morals and abhorrent cruelty make him the personification of the white colonialist, a devil let loose on stolen land.

The plot these three characters are thrown into is essentially of the ‘feminist revenge’ mode: Kent’s cinematic nightmare a dream that, for all its interrogation of dark history, is essentially out to rewrite it: The Nightingale finding the ‘justice’ absent in colonial settlements. In an incredibly brutal first act, Clare is raped — in an already infamous scene employing more to-camera frontality: we watching, unblinking, at our heroine’s face as she suffers — and her husband (Michael Sheasby) and child end up dead. Seeking retribution, she employs a begrudging Billy, via both money and a pointed gun, to help her track the responsible soldiers overland.

This horseback journey — in pursuit of vengeance, and wrongs put right — means that The Nightingale is essentially a Western. Only, its frontier is the cloudy skies, morning mists, and tangled forests of central Tasmania; and its historical backdrop is the ‘Black War’ of early Island settlement, part of a greater colonial campaign of dispossession and death.

For many viewers, Kent’s film will feel like the poking of an open wound. It’s a grim picture; unrelenting and unconcerned with making things easy on viewers. Where the notion of a Western evokes wide-screen splendour, here she and cinematographer Radek Ladczuk shoot in the boxy Academy ratio, the frame itself pressing in on the characters, making the whole feel claustrophobic. Its dramatic revenge-mission mirrors the film’s own ideals: The Nightingale a work with a sense of purpose, seriousness, determination.

Plenty of viewers who were charmed by the giddy and gay spookery of The Babadook may find the terrors, herein, all too confronting and harsh. But, at essence, Kent’s two features are cinematic explorations of the same notion. Each is a horror-movie about repressed trauma. Here, the repression is by Australia, and the unacknowledged trauma is our genocidal past.