It’s honestly a little jarring to see Cate Blanchett in a movie where she gets to use her own accent. But it’s also kind of charming that she would follow up her incredible, career-defining performance in Tár by going home and making a smaller, low-key movie under her Dirty Films production house; yet one that reckons with a specific and shameful side of Australian history. A not-quite-literal film, The New Boy is written and directed by Warwick Thornton, and follows a mysterious and nameless Aboriginal boy as he is found and brought into the fold of an isolated Catholic monastery run by two nuns and a farmer concealing the death of their priest –where his comforts and spiritualism ultimately come to clash with theirs.
Australia’s treatment of its Indigenous throughout the twentieth century unsurprisingly mirrors that of Canada –including the role the Catholic Church played in systematically stamping out their language, traditions, and beliefs through institutions such as schools and the religious house depicted here. The New Boy is very much about bringing attention to that travesty, but chooses to articulate it in a very fascinating way –foregoing the anger and trauma in favour of elegiac symbolism. The movie isn’t so realistic in its depiction of life for these young boys –or rather it seems selective in the authenticity it employs. It showcases their petty conflicts, the mundanity of their life, and the uncertainty of where they eventually leave to. But the monastery is an overall kind and welcoming place where the boys aren’t seemingly subjected to much physical or psychological abuse, beyond the mere fact of the whittling away of their heritage. It’s not exactly that Thornton is ignoring the real pain of these experiences (he lived them personally, which he drew on for the script); he is consciously omitting them for the more metaphorical purpose of his storytelling. And yet the use of a certain amount of authenticity, including a specific period in time, the 1940s, confuses this intent somewhat –makes it easier to read as a comfortable whitewashing.
There’s a reason that the boy, played terrifically by Aswan Reid, has no name for the duration of the story. He is less an individual character than he is a representation of Aboriginal innocence, irrevocably changed by white Christian powers beyond his control. There is an allegory for colonialism directly in how he was living a quiet, contented existence before his capture by white intruders, who force him into another world where he is no longer in control of his own destiny. With inoffensive niceties, they ingrain in him the values of their religion, endeavour to strip him of his in the process, doing the same with language -which he is very reluctant to acquiesce to, remaining silent for most of the narrative. The key sign of this abstract storytelling by the movie comes in the small magic the boy is able to express –overt perhaps, but effective in clarifying the intent. It’s a bit of a nebulous thing, though with some capacity to heal or at least comfort others. And it’s a great extension of the boy’s joy and curiosity. But it is also a tad reductive in its function as a symbol (over the course of the movie it’s power wanes, the more the boy is shaped and influenced by his white caretakers); and as taken literally by the film’s other characters and plot, can’t help but resuscitate a magical Native trope -not helped by the conscious avoidance of specificity (again for the sake of the metaphors) to his spiritualism itself.
The arrival of a great crucifix is the movie’s sign of the growing dominance Catholicism has over the boy’s immediate life and understanding. And it is curious how Thornton depicts the encroachment of western religion on this boy’s mind -which at first he is rather intrigued by, fixated even on the statue, which he sees as a living thing (subtly moving, blinking). He likes to touch or hug it unaware of the sacrilegious connotations that disturb ranking Sister Eileen (Blanchett). And she is thrown into her own crisis of faith by this connection the boy seems to have, his expressions of magic, and even an experience of stigmata. She is drawn to and disturbed by it all, while her colleagues are mostly just disturbed. Whether the boy here is meant to merely comment on the conservative essence of religiosity and how Christians tend to relate to Jesus, or symbolize the insidious alluring nature of Christian colonialism, or even act as a Christ-figure himself in contrast to the man on the crucifix and as a challenge to Sister Eileen’s virtues, Thornton doesn’t confirm any which way -though all are correct reads.
And so the ideas this movie presents, and it’s allegorical dissemination of the effects of Christian colonialism in Australia are very fascinating, enlightening, and often times rich in impact -particularly where Blanchett’s performance in the latter half is concerned, ever the consummate actress that she is, even in a smaller role such as this. But the film can get lost in its layers of meaning at times, in ways that as acknowledged can invite tropes where they’re meant to be archetypes, and even contradict some of the messaging. There’s a small of homo-eroticism to the boy’s interest in the crucifix, a sexual component to the carving emphasized in some of the ways it’s shot. It reminded me of Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, which more overtly addressed Jesus as a sexual figure. But it’s a theme not much supported here, relevant only perhaps as another form of the boy’s casual sacreligiosity. The manner of the film’s construction doesn’t allow for much to develop in the way of character either. Sister Eileen and Deborah Mailman’s Sister Mum, an Indigenous woman herself, have some curious facets, but the boy is mostly projected onto and has almost no interiority. The kind of movie this is doesn’t require these things, but Thornton’s way of going about it does leave something to be desired in terms of personality. That’s also true of his filmmaking, which is very grounded and seeped in structural realism -in a way that does heighten the bits of magic much like Beasts of the Southern Wild did. But it has the effect of flattening the film somewhat, leaving little room for artistic spontaneity -for as good as the movie does look.
Yet there is a real distinctness to it. The story of colonialism has been told many times now by many artists, but the metaphorical, psychological evaluation of it in The New Boy is uniquely powerful and resonant. By not focusing on specific actions or episodes, the overt violence and trauma, the movie articulates a sense of the big picture tragedy of it all; and also perhaps the feelings of identity conflict for Indigenous people like Thornton who have been moulded by the strands of Christian colonialism -not always cleanly executed or cohesive, but one of its better, more compelling illustrations.
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