She is fierce enough to burn a thousand ships
dir: Lee Tamahori
2024
The Convert is set in 1830, and in that place what many (coloniser) people call New Zealand, but the Māori call Aotearoa, so it’s a sad, sorry time before internets and Lynx body spray. It’s also a time of lots of killings and stuff, with the locals slaughtering each other for shits and giggles, and snacks as well, apparently.
And it’s a time when the Brits think all they need to acquire a place from whoever might be there is plant a flag, start building shit, and shoot a defined percentage of the locals at regular intervals.
It’s the only way to keep the rest of ‘em in line. This is also, despite the grimness of the times, well before the so-called Māori Wars that would pit the Brits and certain tribes against other tribes in order to steal all the land, just like God intended. This is the time when they pretend to be polite, but avoid making eye contact with them, in the hopes they’ll just go away or die from chickenpox.
Thomas Munro (Guy Pearce) has been contracted to sail out from England and come to this godforsaken outpost of the Empire in order to minister to the (white) townsfolk of Epworth. Epworth (I think?) would be where present day Canterbury would be, on the east coast of the South Island. Even though most of this flick is filmed on the North Island, but anyway.
It’s really hard to fault wherever they chose to point the camera and film stuff. Aotearoa is that place, so stunning, so daunting in scale that it looks like a fantastical place even though it already exists. It serves as the backdrop for epics like The Lord of the Rings movies, but in this context it establishes that this is a forbidding place, where maybe even humans themselves, let alone the Māori or the Pākehā, as they call them, are not really welcome.
Munro comes into all of this as a calm, good-natured man, who seems to care about all the people around him regardless of their ethnicity. He may be a preacher, but he is a lay preacher, a Protestant at that, and he is of that rare stripe that actually believes Christian charity applies to all people equally. Naturally, this immediately puts him at odds with the town founders who cluck their tongues and stroke their beards.
From the get go, Munro is surrounded by slaughter. Two different iwi, or tribes, slaughter each other, as one chieftain tries to one-up the other. I don’t know if they’re killing for land, or because they’re bored, but Munro is involuntarily in the thick of it.
He endeavours, given the chance, to get a chief, or rangatira, to spare the life of a woman whose husband is killed in front of her, and of course she has to be the daughter of the rival rangatira. Pining her loss, Rangimai (Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne) is in mourning, but in her own ferocious way, and she mostly seems to ignore Munro’s existence as if he is invisible in between her loud keening.
In the course of her travels, he feels obligated to look after her, even when adherence to her mourning rituals has left her vulnerable to an infected wound. The local doctor doesn’t see that his skills or medicines can be spared to save the life of a person he considers to be sub-human, despite Munro’s entreaties, so he is reduced to begging for help from the local outcast Mrs Hegarty (Jacqueline McKenzie), who seems to straddle both worlds reluctantly. At the very least she’s a local midwife / healer, at worst maybe she’s the local witch?
Nah, she’s just Irish, but she also speaks the local lingo. Endlessly helpful, that Mrs Hegarty. I wonder if she has a traumatic and sympathetic backstory for Munro to get excited about, maybe to be delivered after they make sweet love down by the fire?
Munro tries to deliver on his contract: to minister to these heathens of all ethnicities, but he is pulled in multiple directions, somewhat because of his perceived torn loyalties, but mostly because he’s at the mercy of a script that makes him be the lynchpin in too many crucial decisions which are outside of his hands. And the biggest issue is that he is way too familiar with the process of British colonialism, having perpetrated it himself in the past.
There is a scene, late in the film, where Munro delivers his backstory, and, the thing is, the way it comes about is very contrived, exceedingly contrived, but it’s a tremendous scene. Guy Pearce is so good in that scene, and so solid throughout the rest of the film, that it made me think “I forgot how good Guy Pearce is.” Undaunted by the harshness of life in his newfound home, he seems to observe the world itself with great sadness. And yet he’s able to convey this deeply held humanism within him, even as his efforts at peacemaking are completely rebuffed by all and sundry. The Pākehā might eventually see him as a traitor, hence his being the convert of the title, but the Māori see him as hopelessly naïve, so there’s no acceptance there either.
This is not a story where the indigenous are treated as noble savages, living in an arcadian state of tranquility in nature. They are depicted as fiercely oblivious to what awaits them, as canny and ruthless, even as they abide by tribal law and tradition. This of course leaves them perfectly primed and susceptible to British influence.
Guns and butter diplomacy depends upon not only selling weapons to one side of a conflict: why not sell guns to both tribes? Double your profits, and then whoever survives gets to help you slaughter other tribes down the track.
Munro must know this because he’s done this before, seen it play out elsewhere, wherever British entrepreneurship has travelled to. He seeks to try to make sure colonialism doesn’t do here what it’s done absolutely everywhere else, but, yeah, it’s hard not to see that as hopelessly naïve as well.
Older viewers are going to find many parts of this story and its storytelling elements very familiar, especially because the idea of the white saviour going native was old before it was even in Dances with Wolves, but that’s the usual touchstone we refer to, at least since the 1990s. So, yes, it’s familiar. I prefer to think of it as closer to something like Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe, set in what was called New France at the time (Canada), about a religious man forced to acknowledge that religion is a blunt instrument used to bludgeon the indigenous for the purposes of empire.
And the only solution is to kill people. The film explicitly makes the point that the only redemption Munro can hope for, to make up for the innocents of the past that he slaughtered, is to kill again. Only blood redeems blood.
It’s a savage message, and one that I reject in my soul, but it works as it works in the context of the film. The iwi / tribes as represented, well, I’m not in a position to argue how true to life or historically accurate the depictions of tribal life and warfare might be, but considering who made it and where, I have to think that they know better than I do.
And if you’ve ever been thrilled / terrified to watch and hear a haka before a sporting even, well, contextually, as a prelude to a battle, it seems shockingly appropriate. This is a violent film, in other words; warriors butcher warriors on the battlefield, male and female warriors beat each other’s heads in, slit throats or lop heads off, so it’s certainly not a flick to show the kids as an edumacational pseudo documentary or nothing.
I enjoyed it. It looks amazing, like anything shot in Aotearoa has to, but it’s not an uplifting flick, not really. It puts what feels like a temporary reprieve into a context that would get worse over time until the treaty was signed, but well before the wars ended in 1875.
It’s a strong film, and I got much out of it, though I hesitate to say I “enjoyed” it. It’s a bit too brutal and believably depressing for that.
8 times but for a while we were all kings and queens out of 10
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“This is a violent land, steeped in blood.” – of course it is, the plucky Brits got here - The Convert
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