Justin Kurzel goes deeper than the ‘gun violence’ cliché.
Because Justin Kurzel’s Nitram is art, not journalism, it avoids the real-life basis of its story — a 1996 mass murder in the Tasmanian village of Port Arthur, Australia — until the very end. It’s not a blood-and-gore movie climaxing with cheap sensationalism. Instead, putting the massacre off-screen is unsettling in a different way: Kurzel rivets us to the peculiarities of a young adult (played by Caleb Landry Jones) who doesn’t fit in with his peers and is a mystery and problem for his exasperated parents (Judy Davis and Anthony LaPaglia).
Nitram sets forth the moral dilemmas that contemporary journalism — and certainly most of our culture’s dark, violent entertainment movies — no longer acknowledges. Mass murder is not the “issue,” nor is it really the film’s subject. The psychological dynamics are strange, poetic, sometimes funny — and then as frighteningly personal as they are startlingly modern.
The film’s title suggests something unspeakable, but it’s just a backward spelling of the protagonist’s name — Martin, based on the real-life Martin Bryant. It takes that hypocritical journalism practice of not mentioning the names of mass killers (under the ludicrous pretense that “it gives them the celebrity they crave”) and ties it to the clever schoolyard cruelty of kids deliberately mocking Martin as slow, backward, retarded. This titular jest by Kurzel and screenwriter Shaun Grant is worthy of Todd Solondz at his unnerving best.
Kurzel, who made the intensely expressive 2015 Macbeth, goes beyond outrage to explore tragedy at the core of bewilderment. The film’s look at human failure and fate is so plain and honest, it gives our shock and sympathy Shakespearean dimension. Kurzel redirects social disaster (the public horror that has haunted Australia since the atrocity Bryant committed, leading to the country’s gun-reform laws) to command our focus on individual crisis.
Martin’s sociopathic behavior finds a mate in an older, eccentric heiress Helen (Essie Davis), whose obsession with Gilbert and Sullivan operetta creates a problematic private world. This contrasts Martin’s difficult upbringing — his father resorts to best-pal nostrums, the mother tries balancing tenderness and discipline. A remarkable confrontation between Mum and Helen broaches jealousy and protection (“Is he a husband or is he a son? Which is he?”). A disturbing moment of Martin’s pathetic attempt to rouse his ailing father forecasts the boy’s pathetic efforts at communicating his confusion.
In these moments, Nitram’s actors reveal misunderstandings between children, adults, and, under stressful circumstances, society’s naïve, misguided expectations. Jones, LaPaglia, and both Davis thespians (especially Judy Davis’s face — a road map of experience) refuse actorly self-protection. They each edge into an emotional abyss. They evoke the tensions Mike Leigh and Ken Russell admitted about the British Empire.
As in The True History of the Kelly Gang, Kurzel confronts his national legacy. His artistry resists Jane Campion’s pseudo-history and native dystopia angle, and outclasses the movie We Need to Talk About Kevin, which attempted to turn the trauma of mass murder into nihilistic chic. (Shame on you, Tilda Swinton!) Refusing to fetishize disaster as Gus Van Sant did in his Columbine film Elephant, Kurzel and Grant peer into guilt that’s beyond the capacity of activist parents to consider and that crusading journalists are too crude to understand. Nitram also touches on the lost-child psychosis behind Antifa that our media have neglected. No wonder a film this powerful has opened without the critical fanfare it deserves.
When Martin inevitably visits a gun shop, Kurzel’s matter-of-factness is way beyond the media’s blame game about “gun violence.” His calm cultural observation recalls Martin’s inability to access local surfing culture as an opposite emotional/sexual outlet. The quiet pathology of Martin kissing his mirror reflection offers a profound consideration. After the concussive effects of mass shootings around the world, Kurzel doesn’t pretend shock, alarm, or cynicism. Connecting grief and regret between parents and children shows a wider, deeper grasp.
