Justin Kurzel’s True History of the Kelly Gang is a visually stunning and sensationally acted telling of the life of the legendary Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. Kurzel’s version of Kelly’s story is based on the 2001 Booker Prize-winning novel by famed Australian novelist Peter Carey, which was adapted by Shaun Grant.
Kurzel’s terrifying debut, 2011’s The Snowtown Murders showed his potential, which was further confirmed by his dark 2015 take on Macbeth. His reputation took a hit with 2016’s muddled Assassin’s Creed adaptation, but he’s back with force and with creative control here.
Played by 1917’s George MacKay with a mesmerizing mix of physicality and mania, Kelly is portrayed as a sensitive soul driven to wild extremes after a childhood and adolescence marked by abuse, bigotry and poverty. The story begins with a young Ned taking over as man of the house from his cuckold father, who is sentenced to jail time and subsequently killed after Ned illegally shoots and butchers someone else’s cow.
The intense, bright-eyed Orlando Schwerdt, making his feature film debut here as young Ned, is quite the find. He sets up McKay’s compelling performance by showing Ned to be bold, charismatic and sensitive even as a boy. A boy who is tasked with being the man of the house from far too young an age, and whose mother rewards violence with affection and weakness with scorn.
Essie Davis plays Ned’s mom Ellen Kelly with ferocity and tenderness. Ellen is a complicated character, one who is painfully aware of the limited power given to women at her time and place in society. So she manipulates men in whatever ways she can but is repeatedly let down by even the best of them. Davis is particularly effective at showing the spirit leaving Ellen as a normal, happy life slips further and further out of reach. She’s like an old-fashioned version of Jacki Weaver’s Smurf Cody from the 2010 Australian hit Animal Kingdom.
Ned’s life is marked by run-ins with vicious, powerful men, starting with Charlie Hunman’s Sgt. O’Neil, who imprisons his father and abuses his mother. Ned is then sold into the service of famed bushranger Harry Power (Russell Crowe, hamming it up), who teaches him the ins and outs of being an outline. His final and most significant foe is Constable Fitzpatrick, an Englishman with a taste for young prostitutes and deception. Nicholas Hoult does his best work as the beautiful, horrible Fitzpatrick, a slick but depraved lawman who becomes obsessed with Kelly.
The storytelling is a big jagged, with an unnecessary voice over bridging unexplained jumps in time. Scenes often feel as if they cut at the wrong moment, and the narration fills in the gaps. For instance, Ned spares the vile Fitzpatrick in one scene, only to turn into an indiscriminate murderer in the very next scene. And there’s an otherworldliness to it all, but the outlaws in dresses, the horses walking around indoors and masked partygoers and modern musicians don’t match up tonally with the gritty, bloody story. It gets a little too meta at times, like when Gladiator-like scenes of tall grass blowing gently in the wind are immediately followed by Crowe appearing as the aging, heavy-drinking bushranger Power. And commentary about the English trying to eradicate Irish culture in the same way that they abused Australia’s Aboriginal people may have truth to them but serve to minimize the genocide inflicted upon the Aboriginal people, which is particularly tone deaf considering the lack of nonwhite characters in the film.
The technical credits, however, are consistently outstanding. The haunting music was composed by Jed Kurzel, younger brother and frequent collaborator of the director. Kurzel, who also worked with Jennifer Kent on The Babadook and The Nightingale is making quite the name for himself in the independent film scene and composes music that add layers of tension to the film. And Alice Babidge’s costume designs are particularly intriguing in that they ably straddle many lines, between masculine and feminine, rich and poor, soldier and outlaw.
Cinematographer Ari Wegner, building on the strong work he did in standout indies like 2016’s Lady Macbeth and last year’s underseen In Fabric, brings out pops of color against the harsh browns and greys of the Australian wilderness. And though it skews a bit theatrical at times, Karen Murphy’s production design, with its rundown landscapes and crumbling colonial buildings, brings a Fury Road-like desolation to 19th century Australia.
The tenderest parts of the film come from the few, romantically tinged scenes between Ned and his best mate Joe Byrne (Sean Keenan). As much of this account is fictional, the film an artistic interpretation of a fictional account of a legend-laced historical figure, Kurzel wouldn’t have been out of bounds in expanding on Ned and Joe’s story. And it would have made Ned more knowable and made it easier to understand how Ned developed such an ardent following.
True History of the Kelly Gang shows the abundant skill of Justin Kurzel and his collaborators and proves to be an excellent platform for a number of actors, particularly Essie Davis and George MacKay. While some of the risks Kurzel and company take pay off, there are other areas where you can’t help but wish they would have been a bit bolder in their telling of this larger than life story.
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