Skip to main content

An Empty Portrait of a Psycho


There’s a very careful line to be walked making a movie about a mass shooter. It’s not a job I envy of any director though the motivation must be highly scrutinized. What is to be gained by dramatizing such a story, by highlighting such a figure? These are the vital questions that need to be answered to prevent the movie from being merely an exercise in either nihilism or bad faith. And that heavy task probably accounts for why this subject matter hasn’t been attempted so much, at least not from the point-of-view of the perpetrator. Gus Van Sant won the Palme d’Or for his Columbine movie Elephant and since then nobody’s really felt the taste for it, especially in the United States where mass shootings are extraordinarily common. Australia on the other hand…
Australia has had one major incident of this type and it famously led to an extreme crackdown on gun laws in that country -albeit laws that director Justin Kurzel  would like to emphasize (though only in postscript) aren’t being followed around the country. His movie Nitram has the Port Arthur Massacre looming in the background, but he concentrates the bulk of the film on a profile of the person who carried it out, whose name is never revealed by the movie (though as an identifier he occasionally refers to bullies calling him ‘Nitram’), but was really Martin Bryant, a disturbed, intellectually disabled young man from Hobart, Tasmania -why the movie dances around this specificity I’m not sure.
It’s a strange and unsettling story to say the least, and that’s just what the movie is as well. Afraid to go in depth on his condition out of possible concern for stigmatization, Kurzel goes to efforts not to explain Nitram much, but it doesn’t stop the movie from falling into the occasional uncomfortable trap of ableist signifiers -particularly in the choices of Caleb Landry Jones’ performance. When he plays with firecrackers among a group of schoolkids or grabs at the steering wheel of a moving car, as authentic as such scenes are to the truth, it feels disingenuous. Even more so are the moments of creative licence where he approaches someone in his underwear or beats up on his incapacitated father –alien expressions that very much play to misconceptions about people with Asperger’s, which Bryant was eventually diagnosed with.
Not that any of this makes much a difference with the awkward quality of Jones’ performance. In a way, it’s a role that has been lying in wait for him ever since Get Out gained him widespread recognition as a creep. Eventually, he was going to have to play this kind of psychotic killer. And so there’s not really anything surprising to his performance as Nitram, aside from a decent Australian accent. It’s incredibly vacant, plain but for Jones’ slimy air, the film again not much up to exploring the character beneath the surface –a problem when he is the vessel for audience empathy.
There is no empathy to be found though, no understanding. Nitram has no redeeming depth, no source of human sympathy –principally because the movie seems unwilling to give him any. Where there might be a search for connection, it is buried under his often intolerable behaviour and relentlessly hostile attitude. His relationship with the eccentric heiress Helen (Essie Davis), up to and including living in her isolated mansion, is fascinating only from her standpoint: why would she welcome this strange young man into her home? It’s the most interesting dynamic of the movie, her affection towards him as a kind of platonic gigolo whom she invests a lot in, his reliance on her as a source of comfort and company. But it is still ultimately hollow for how curious it is, and Nitram emerges from the episode none changed for the experience. Worse, he doesn’t even seem open to growth.
More than ever here the question is again raised, why? Why are we seeing this story in this way? Why should we care? What is the film trying to say? And again, it struggles to arrive at an answer. Any value in the story seems to rest with its’ disturbing details, and yet they’re not so disturbing so as to be especially scandalous. Mostly they are scenes of intense awkwardness hinting at a potential for violence, such as when he tries to force an eviction on a house he wanted with a duffle bag of money, or when he impulsively decides to book an immediate international flight with a flustered travel agent. All of it amounts to simply the image of a man Kurzel appears to believe was pretty much beyond hope from the start –and we’re just made to witness the signature touchstones on his inevitable road to destruction. Yet looking up the story of Bryant yields so much more than the movie does. There’s not a trace of his apparent crippling loneliness, his pathological interest in how others perceive him, or his suicide attempt in the film, all of which would add dimension to him and his story. Such inclinations towards complexity here are so subtle so as to be nonexistent; there is nothing about this man the movie wants you to find relatable. He is too infamous, too hated to be given that luxury. What’s left is a shell and not a terribly enticing one to watch.
Where the movie had a chance to be something more than an empty expose was in the parents, whose point of view could have been highlighted more and who are as is the movies’ only real strong point. Judy Davis is the stand-out as the stern, impatient, and emotionally drained mother, lacking the capacity to reach out the way Anthony LaPaglia’s father does, seemingly as recompense for earlier abuse. Both are incredibly tired and burdened by Nitram –though clearly haven’t been the best of parents. Davis is especially good at implying the nuance of her fractured relationship with her son, but again the movie isn’t interested in explicitly discussing it, choosing every time to return focus to the omniscient take on a kid who shoots at car windows with a pellet gun for “fun”.
Kurzel has the good taste not to show the tragedy of Port Arthur itself. And yet he still builds up to it as though he wants to, tracing Nitram’s path to the tourist site with ominous overhead shots of an unsuspecting public. Shortly beforehand there’s a long sequence in a gun shop that’s actually quite harrowing given how casual it all is, how unconcerned with safety and regulation the proprietor is (the knowledge such scenes play out much the same in places like the United States today adding to its’ spookiness).  It is the one scene that speaks to the message Kurzel attaches to the end of the film about gun law in Australia, which feels like yet another attempt to aimlessly ascertain the movies’ point. Nitram has none –it is made purely for the sake of dramatizing a story that, in one way or another, has had an impact on Australia’s modern history. Not bold enough to interrogate its’ character but determined to maintain his vantage point, the movie offers nothing insightful, nothing challenging –a weak interpretation of a figure with such strong and lasting repercussions.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
1 comment
Read more

Back to the Feature: New York, New York (1977)

New York, New York  is a two hour forty minute musical movie largely about a toxic relationship and I understand why it was Martin Scorsese’s first big flop. Some have blamed its poor reception on the kind of movie it was, of a style and tone Scorsese wasn’t known for, but I find that hard to believe. Even after only five films, he’d proven himself an extremely versatile director, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore  found an audience. Sure this jazz musical love letter to New York City was following up Taxi Driver and its’ far more cynical take on the city, but then it’s also ‘from the director of Taxi Driver ’ which itself was a big hit. Was it a matter of public appetite for musicals, or mere word of mouth and early critical reception that dissuaded viewers? Irrespective of that, I was stunned to discover this movie was the origin of the titular song, which I’d assumed was much older (it’s definitely got the sound of something that might have come out of the Jazz sce...
Post a Comment
Read more