To every good boy there should be a Tinkerbell
dir: Warwick Thornton
2023
This flick is a bit of a wonder.
I think when it was screened at Cannes the year before, it was in the form of a two hour movie. When it was released in cinemas it had been trimmed down to about 90 minutes. The version I watched is the two hour version, so I can’t comment on the theatrical release, because…
Why would anyone want a Warwick Thornton film to be any shorter?
If you are a fan of his films and of his cinematography, you would want everything to be fifteen hours long and never end.
One of my favourite things he’s been involved in was The Beach, which was a strange 6 episode 3 hour ‘doco’ about Warwick in a shack on a beach, and that’s about it. You watch him curse at some chooks, plant some seeds and call them “bastards” while doing so, drive in an ancient jeep, do some fishing and cooking, and… it goes on for hours and hours, with lots of drone footage, and lots of static shots that go on for eternity.
They played this on NITV / one of the SBS channels way back during the lockdowns, under the banner of “slow tv”, which was something, perversely, many of us got into during a time when we couldn’t go anywhere. Four hour train journeys with minimal cuts. Drone footage of beaches that go on for days and days. It was very therapeutic, thanks.
This flick, The New Boy, is not therapeutic. It is strange, but oddly conventional as well because of certain choices made and others not made. It is exquisitely filmed, as you expect from Warwick, since everything he films (that we see, since he’s cinematographer / director of photography on all his own films) is exquisite.
It is set in the 1940s during the war, but is also set in a remote part of New South Wales, I guess, although it is so far west that it’s in South Australia, at least that’s where most of it was filmed.
The main character, or the character we assume is the main character is the new boy of the title, dumped in a hessian sack by a cop at this orphanage after being violently captured.
Orphanage – Mission – boarding school – these words seem so innocuous, so harmless. We know what these places mean during a time period where children were stolen, almost an entire generation of them, from their families and their people. Boys, in this case, brought here under the auspices of it being for their own good; baptised, educated, trained for work and then sent off essentially as indentured servants for little to no pay.
The new boy doesn’t seem to know any of the English they fling at him, doesn’t really get much of the point of clothes or sandals, prefers the floor to a dormitory bed, and doesn’t seem to get most of the trappings of British civilisation beyond jam. He gets jam.
In what is the first of many bizarre moments in the flick, the facility appears to be run by Sister Eileen (Cate Blanchett), or at least she opens the door when the cop is dropping the kid off, and she immediately gets into a boxer’s pose with the cop, threatening to fight him? I have to assume that Blanchett’s choices in this flick are entirely her own, since she and Thornton developed the story over many years, and her production company had a role in seeing this flick come together.
There are many strange elements to the story. The reason I refer to them as ‘strange’ is because this is a story Thornton has been wanting to make for twenty years or more, with elements taken from his own life, his own experiences, having been forcibly interned at a boarding school run by nuns when he was a boy.
But…
I don’t doubt that the young boy is an ideal avatar for the director and for his experiences as a kid in such a place, but there are elements of the set up, and elements of the story that can’t really be from his memories.
Unless I’m wrong, and Warwick actually did have magical powers as a child.
I don’t want to sound like I’m being derisive, because that isn’t my intention, and because I do think the way the story represents what happened to the kid in terms of the broader attempt to annihilate not only the indigenous peoples of this place we now call Australia but their very indigeneity, to be beautiful and sad and deeply touching.
It's just… how do you tell this story without falling prey to the same kinds of storytelling decisions that even someone like Baz Lurhman would make, and did make when he made that despicable Australia flick?
I’m not going to elaborate on that, because I don’t think it helps.
The new boy is an absolute chaos agent. From the moment he is dropped off, he doesn’t get with no program, abides no restrictions and listens to no-one ever. Just does chaos things for chaotic reasons, or at least reasons that don’t make any sense to those of us not swimming in chaos.
You might think I mean he starts fires or stabbing people, but that’s not at all what I mean. He just is from completely somewhere else and has completely different ways of behaving.
And the nuns do nothing to really stop him. And there are other boys there with him, but they are so blank, so undifferentiated, that they hardly register.
I think part of the issue (for me, not for anyone else) is that if you, like me, saw and loved Samson and Delilah, you would know that Thornton as a director tells stories through visual storytelling techniques that aren’t just people delivering reams of dialogue to explain everything and people’s motivations most of all. The new boy speaks two words throughout the whole movie. Everyone else (except most of the boys) talks lots and lots of words.
Except George (the great Wayne Blair), who speaks few terse words, but he does most of his acting through scowling. His scowl of disapproval could both crush people’s spirits and power a large suburb.
There is another nun who tells the boys to call her Sister Mum (the great Deborah Mailman), and she chatters lots, and is kind to New Boy. Pretty much everyone is kind to him, surprisingly kind.
See, that’s the first thing that struck me as unlikely. I was educated by nuns in the 1980s. They beat the shit out of us. I don’t want to watch films where nuns or anyone abuse kids or anyone, ever again. I know it happened, I’m not blind or in denial. Few people loathe the Catholic Church more than I do. But that doesn’t mean I have an infinite capacity for watching violence, true or otherwise.
Maybe that wasn’t relevant to Warwick, because I’m telling you I have no doubt they did the same and probably way worse to him. Maybe he feels that what they did to him, what they do to the boy spiritually is the real crime, the really terrible thing that happened, beyond the physical abuse. I don’t know, I will never know.
It just, for me, unbalances the film. They spend enough time to let us know what weird and sad people the nun’s are, but Blanchett and Mailman clearly didn’t want to play monstrous characters. So Sister Mum is fierce and loving towards the boys, having lost her own children. And Blanchett’s sister is an alcoholic, but she’s also essentially running the place in secret, with the priest who had been in charge having died, but she hasn’t notified anyone, and writes to officials in his name, and signs his signature. In a section that’s meant to be (I think) both hilarious and monstrous, she and Sister Mum pretend that Dom Peter is still alive, and senile and lecherous.
This implies at least that when he was alive the poor nuns had to fight off the advances of a senile old monk who tried to sexually assault them and constantly verbally abused them.
One of the only words New Boy learns comes from this scene, being the repeated word “slut!” The other is “Amen”, appropriately enough, though it’s never deployed at exactly the right time.
A large statue of Christ on the cross is delivered to the orphanage, requiring the subterfuge for the delivery signature, but this sets off the beginning of the end, so to speak, of the new boy’s connection to his magical world. New Boy watches the suffering Christ, but to him the figure is alive, and it seems cruel to keep him up there, nailed to that wretched thing, especially since there is so much pain in his blinking eyes.
There’s a whole lot of admixing of Christian iconography, stigmata, illusions or delusions at play here, going from the boy letting the Christ down from his station, to putting the nails through his own hands, to being coddled by the senior nun, and getting drunk, I guess, on her stash of wine(?)
There’s something that I’ve been leaving out, but I don’t think I can write about the whole film without mentioning at least the tragedy that occurs at the end. There is something special about the new boy, something that I would guess we would call, in our Western way, supernatural. It is represented as real, as something profoundly mystical and unexplained, but real and shocking, at least to everyone who isn’t the new boy.
Sister Eileen sees this, sees something miraculous in the boy, but somehow chooses, since she is a nun after all, to normalise the boy by baptising him, which puts an end to whatever connection he had to country, to the spirits that imbue these hills with life and wonder, to his ancestors.
I think this is meant to be the central tragedy of the flick, of the new boy’s existence, of what I think Warwick is saying, is the worst thing they did to him.
And I think I get it. It’s just that – Christianity isn’t real. There’s no more magical power to it than any other religion. It has no more power to sever someone’s connection to Country than it does raising the dead or healing the sick. I can only grapple with it being metaphorical because otherwise…
I dunno. The Catholic Church has committed so many crimes, harmed so many people, including and especially the First Nations people of this continent. And I’m not even talking about the impact of imposing a European belief system on people who have their own spiritual way of explaining their existence and connecting themselves to a place and the people that have come before them. That’s got to have had a profoundly negative impact on a lot of people.
But there are people, indigenous peoples, who have reconciled these contradictory aspects of their beliefs, in that it’s not unheard of to read the writings of indigenous elders who profess a deep faith in Christ as well as an adherence to and reverence for the beliefs of their mob, and their deep connection to country.
I am at something of a loss, because the flick just ends abruptly, and I was left feeling confused and sad, hoping that New Boy would at least grow up and hold his first camera, realising there was still a path out of this strange place.
See, it’s unfair, entirely, to judge a film like this, or to expect a flick like this to be commercially or critically viable. To me Warwick Thornton is a genius with a camera, with a yarn, with the poetry of the moving image, so judging him against other Australian or indigenous directors is impossible. I can only judge him, and let’s be honest, how fucking presumptuous is it of me to judge him or anyone else, for that matter, against his own movies. And this one, for me, doesn’t resonate as deeply as Samson and Delilah, or Sweet Country, which is its own thing again.
So, in the end, I feel like I should be grateful more than critical. I should just be glad to have another Warwick Thornton flick to watch, and if I didn’t understand parts of it, that’s on me. I will, if I’m lucky, have the time and luxury to watch this again to appreciate it even more, down the track, to enjoy the exquisitely shot scenery even more, and the strange performances, and the light tinkling and mordant beauty of yet another Nick Cave / Warren Ellis soundtrack. This isn’t on the level of the ones they did for The Proposition, or the even greater The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but it’s still nice.
It's fine. I really wanted to love it. Alas…
7 times the nuns have a lot to answer for, but providing food and clothing and affection aren’t part of their list of crimes out of 10
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“After a shaky start, he is learning to read and to write. He has a passion for Christ, and I feel he may even follow in my footsteps.” – there’s lies, damned lies, and then religion - The New Boy
https://www.imdb.com/video/vi78890777/?playlistId=tt18180926&ref_=tt_ov_vi
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