Sentencing process – Weekend – Kommersant
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The release of Nitram, last year’s Cannes contestant, is the backstory of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. Leading actor Caleb Landry Jones won an acting award at Cannes, but that’s not the only reason to watch the gloomy film shot by Australian Justin Kurzel.
Nitram (Caleb Landry Jones) is in his early twenties, but his mannerisms are the perfect child. Hyperactive, stubborn, loose and at the same time angular, shy and aggressive, with unwashed hair – for which his mother (Judy Davis) often scolds him – and a listless face that only brightens up when the kid sets fire to a firecracker. Nitram spends his time loitering around the neighborhood at the devil’s horns. Classmates considered him stupid, “nitram” is just a nickname, something like a “brake”. He then goes to the ocean to look at the mighty surfers, then he sets off fireworks with the kids.
The Nitram family lives on the island of Tasmania, known for its poisonous fauna and British convicts, so they treat their son’s eccentricities with a weary understanding – they haven’t seen anything like that here. Dad (Anthony LaPaglia) is unsuccessfully trying to change his fate and give his loved ones, and above all the foolish son, a new chance: in his opinion, a mortgage and a family business will help them – the father wants to buy a guest house on the ocean and serve tourists. Mom is melancholy withdrawn into herself, she forbids Nitram to ride the board, makes sure that the pants are washed, and strongly advises him to start mowing the lawns. While trying to get his first job, Nitram meets an eccentric lady named Helen (played by Justin Kurzel’s wife Essie Davis). She loves to feed the dogs, change cars, sing arias from the comic opera The Mikado, and is so lonely that she is ready to take responsibility for the white-haired young man, even if he shoots pneumatics right in her yard.
Kurzel’s film opens with the title “based on a true story” and three mental health emergency numbers that viewers living in Australia can call. The plot is really based on the historical events of a quarter of a century ago, when the prototype of the protagonist Martin Bryant, a rosy-cheeked and fair-haired guy in his thirties, committed the most massacre in the history of Australia, shooting 35 people and injuring more than twenty more. The reasons for the incident could not be established, Bryant was sentenced to 35 life terms and another 1652 years of imprisonment without the right to appeal the sentence.
As startled bystanders often say in docu-series, “We are unlikely to ever understand what led up to this.” This is probably true, but Kurzel, together with his constant collaborator Sean Grant, is still trying to figure out what the tragedy grew out of, reconstructing the events preceding the massacre – the hero’s restless wandering around the microdistrict, and the accidental death of his strange girlfriend, and his father’s depression, who gave up after his business plan didn’t work.
A huge role in this process of understanding “from what that went” goes to Caleb Landry Jones, who played the main character. The actor did not just get the Cannes Film Festival award for Best Actor. His Nitram is an inconvenient person both for himself, and for his parents, and for his neighbors, and even for the ocean, which does not accept him. Pure despair, which is filled with disaster. You feel the painful disproportion of the asocial protagonist to the banal circumstances of fate for more than a hundred minutes of screen time. By and large, Nitram is only accepted as one of his own in a gun shop. He walks in with a bag of money and no license, and walks out with a bag of automatic weapons. In the nineties, a barrel in Australia could be registered after purchase. Literally 12 days after the murders in Port Arthur, Australian legislation will be revised, and measures preventing the free circulation of firearms will be seriously strengthened, although this will not help rid the population of all guns.
However, Nitram doesn’t seem to be about gun control at all. This is not an attack by a social critic. Rather, in this work, Kurzel continues his debut “Snowtown” (2010), in which the everyday life of gray reality clearly captivated the author more than reading morality. There, the director indifferently watched how life inevitably gives rise to crime and the tornado of evil picks up a person, forever taking him away from the familiar world. Against the backdrop of the psychodrome of Snowtown, the heroes of Nitram may seem like exemplary students of a parochial school, but the more terrible and inexplicable tragedy that blows up their world, like a curse from higher powers. The gloomy predestination of this story involuntarily brings to mind the fact that five years earlier Kurzel had modernized Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”. “Thus with quiet steps life creeps / To the last unfinished page” – any of the heroes of “Nitram” could subscribe to these words.
In theaters from 24 November
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