Justin Kurzel has had an interesting career so far, debuting as a feature-length director with the grueling, disturbing true crime drama The Snowtown Murders in 2011, before helming considerably more mainstream fare like Macbeth, Assassin’s Creed and True History of the Kelly Gang. For his fifth film, Nitram, he returns to the sort of dark, true-life material with which he made his name, and he does so with aplomb. The film depicts nine years in the life of its subject, which culminate in him committing Australia’s worst-ever single-person mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania in April 1996. This tragedy, in which 35 people were killed and a further 23 were injured, was so significant that it led to a major national overhaul of Australia’s gun ownership laws, which individual states have sadly still not implemented.
The film begins in early 1987, and we see from the conduct of Nitram (Caleb Landry Jones) as a mentally disabled 19-year-old living with his parents (Anthony LaPaglia and Judy Davis) that he clearly does not know how to adhere to norms of social behavior. For instance, he sets off fireworks on his street in the middle of the night and in a school playground when young children are on their lunch break. However, he does not yet seem to be a full-blown sociopath; he is able to engage a young woman (Phoebe Taylor) on the beach in conversation and ask a local housewife (Jessie Ward) if she needs her lawn mowed.
While his interactions with his mother are somewhat cold, he is shown to have a loving and affectionate relationship with his father, with the two of them going for centering drives in the countryside together. The film has already been criticized as sexist for the disparity between how sympathetically/unsympathetically the father and mother (respectively) are portrayed as parents. If this was not the case in real life, then these criticisms are undoubtedly legitimate, but the character of Helen (Essie Davis), a wealthy, middle-aged woman for whom Nitram becomes a sort of live-in odd-job man, is shown as having a positive influence on his behavior and providing him with a positive female role model. We can see from his interactions with her and his father (and, to a far lesser extent, his mother) that he is capable of expressing basic affection.
Sadly, this situation doesn’t last. Helen is killed in a car crash caused by Nitram grabbing the wheel of the car in which they are both traveling. Kurzel directs scenes depicting both the crash and its aftermath in a believably graphic and unsettling way, although he mercifully doesn’t replicate the horrors of The Snowtown Murders’ sickening shower scene. Credit should also go to Jones for his powerful portrayal of Nitram’s grief at Helen’s death and his subsequent mental unraveling. In the months and years that follow, we see him take up drinking, physically attack his aging, ailing father and intimidate the elderly couple who gazumped Nitram’s family out of a B&B that they were planning to buy several years earlier. This is the first hint we see of his properly nasty side, and his deterioration is shown to be a possible factor in his father’s suicide.
Shortly before committing the Port Arthur mass shooting, Nitram is shown watching a news report about the mass shooting in Dunblane, Scotland that preceded it by a few weeks. Some commentators have described Dunblane as having had a “copycat” effect on Port Arthur, but Kurzel and screenwriter Shaun Grant take an agnostic view of whether Nitram was inspired to commit a mass shooting of his own by it.
When it comes to depicting the shooting itself, Kurzel tastefully opts to keep it offscreen. The café at which the majority of the tragedy occurred is filmed in a bird’s-eye-view shot, making the patrons (who are shortly to become Nitram’s victims) appear powerless and helpless. Just before he carries the act out, he orders a fruit salad and juice and consumes them at a table contentedly, providing as good a picture of the banality of evil as cinemagoing audiences will have seen for quite some time. The fact that he keeps a camcorder at his side while eating does suggest that a desire for publicity may have been a key motive for his actions, but again, Kurzel’s film offers no direct opinion as to why Nitram did what he did. It raises a lot of questions, but does not seek to resolve them with artificially “neat” answers. And this is all to the good, because for a writer and director to use a film like this to promulgate their own theories as to why a tragedy of this nature occurred would be both fraudulent to the audience and disrespectful to the deceased.
Nitram is likely one of the most affecting dramas audiences will see this year. Grant and Kurzel tackle problematic and controversial subject matter, but they do so sensitively and skillfully. It would have been very easy for lesser writers and directors to make a film about the Port Arthur mass shooting that was trite, anemic, distasteful and didactic, but they have managed to craft a tense, ominous 112-minute psychological drama that is none of these things. Cinematographer Germain McMicking captures the drabness of late 1980s/1990s Tasmania palpably, and Jones, LaPaglia and both the Davises turn in intensely watchable and believable performances.
The film may (sadly) be unable to offer any easy solutions to the prevalence of mass shootings, but if it purported to, then it would be a far less effective and intellectually honest film. What it does have the potential to (and hopefully will) do is to foment a wide-ranging debate about what drives people (overwhelmingly men) to commit acts of violence as horrifying as this, and what actions can be taken to prevent such acts from reoccurring in the future. Whether it does this or not, the filmmakers should feel proud for crafting a powerful portrait of a weak young man who feels as though society has cast him aside.
Photo courtesy of IFC Films
The post Nitram appeared first on Spectrum Culture.