Bea says: About half an hour in, I had an urge to run away from this film. I had a sense of foreboding an absolutely nothing, nothing good was going to happen, I knew it. But I told myself, I had to sit it out, and see it through. It is my country's history, and it's shame.
So I stayed with it, and watched it, and it was bad (in terms of my sense of foreboding, not the film), but not all bad. Sam and his wife evade the party hunting them down, and could have continued to if circumstances had been different. Justice is served, and Sam is found to have been acting in self defence, with no case to answer. I won't say any more about the plot as even this spoils enough.
Sam Neill is back to getting some good parts these days, and is fantastic as the good egg religious landowner. Bryan Brown plays a complex character (the sergeant) well. Great performances from all others; and the "Western" style filming and beautiful country are well done. I am not enough of a student of the Western genre (although I have seen many of them) to have picked all the references. The Johny Cash song over the closing credits I am sure is one of them.
A must-see. The closing line from Sam Neill gives pause for thought.
****
Cecil says: Not a film I'd recommend if you need your spirits lifting. The sense of foreboding doesn't take long to take hold; in fact already in the opening scene, which just shows us some boiling water on a campfire, and a guy adding coffee (?) and sugar, while in the background you hear the noise of someone being beaten up by a nasty racist.
Sam Neill and Bryan Brown, those old stalwarts of Australian cinema, are brilliant as ever: Neill as the gentle, religious farmer who treats Aboriginals as equals; Brown as the obsessive sergeant determined to track down the fugitive Sam Kelly, who has shot the awful March.
It's something of a relief when March does get his comeuppance fairly early in the film, though by then the viewer has been put through some of the horrifying deeds and attitudes of 'white fellahs' that must have been so common back then.
Sam Neill's last line in the film does make you reflect on where Australia is at today. The judge is clearly a new generation urban type, probably up from Sydney or Melbourne. And to some extent Australia is still divided between city and country, though the country town we have chosen to live in is probably among the more progressive in Australia. But those attitudes we see from the white fellahs through most of 'Sweet Country' have probably not changed that much in some of the more remote outback towns even today.
Hamilton Morris as Sam Kelly shows great wisdom throughout plus a fantastic ability to survive in the tough outback. Archie reminded me of those Native American trackers who helped the whites in America catch up with Injuns. And Philomac is an interesting character: I quickly suspected that he might be Kennedy's son, but his survival instinct is also extraordinary, with a scary last line from him at the end of the movie. (clever casting, too, with maybe two brothers playing him as he gets older, or in flashback scenes?)
Funny coincidence that Philomac might be the son of someone called Kennedy. Because the shooting at the end, with the blood spurting over the wife in the carriage, is surely a reminder of what happened to JFK some 50 years later (though it's also a bit hard to know when the film was set, or which British Army action March and the Sergeant are supposed to have fought in).
Beautifully filmed, you could almost touch the sand and dust, and I almost began waving those flies away from my face even though there were none in the lovely old Theatre Royal in Castlemaine.
***
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