Arriving right on time for Australia's contested January 26 public holiday, the thorny new action drama High Ground is the latest in a growing body of local revisionist films to tangle with the racial violence that has become inseparable from the nation's troubled past.
Yolngu Boy director Stephen Maxwell Johnson's first film in nearly two decades begins in post-World War I Arnhem Land, where the lush, almost primordial beauty of the natural landscape belies a festering tension between white settlers and the Indigenous people who have long called the region home.
Near a peaceful lagoon where an Indigenous family are enjoying a meal, a police patrol of ex-soldiers led by sniper Travis (Simon Baker) and his spotter Eddy (Callan Mulvey) are attempting to apprehend a pair of getaways when their search party turns into a shooting gallery, and several of the cops — a little too eager to pull the trigger — slaughter the family in cold blood.
In the melee — a brutal, uncompromising sequence, in stark contrast to the idyllic scenes that open the film — Travis, struck by a crisis of conscience, puts a bullet in two of his out-of-control colleagues. The only Indigenous survivor is a young boy, Gutjuk, who the patrol bundles up and delivers to local missionaries Braddock (Ryan Corr) and Claire (Caren Pistorious, last seen suffering another problematic white man, Russell Crowe's deranged stalker in Unhinged).
Twelve years later, obdurate, king-and-country-bound police chief Moran (Jack Thompson) is rounding up a posse to hunt down the Aboriginal warrior Baywara (Sean Mununggurr), a rebel leader whose "Wild Mob" has been torching white property — a crime that far exceeds the massacre of an entire Indigenous family in the eyes of the law.
Moran enlists a reluctant Travis, now a weathered and disillusioned bounty hunter, by threatening to expose his execution of the white cops; and the now adult Gutjuk (newcomer Jacob Junior Nayinggul), convinced that the young man will help smoke out his uncle, Baywara, and bring the mob under control.
As the two men set out across the landscape, High Ground seems to be establishing itself in the tradition of the unlikely-buddy Western, with Travis — the sympathetic, or at least sufficiently conflicted white man — bonding with Gutjuk, teaching the young man how to shoot a rifle, and in turn learning the lay of the land.
Johnson and Yolngu Boy screenwriter Chris Anastassiades are quick to upend any notion of a rugged, conciliatory trek, however — the kind where cultural differences conveniently dissolve in the common bond between men. With Moran dispatching Eddy and his tracker Walter (Mystery Road's Aaron Pedersen) in pursuit of Travis and Gutjuk, the film rapidly becomes a series of ugly skirmishes and simmering standoffs — action sequences whose repetitiveness seems designed to evoke the frustrating cycle of violence from which these men can't escape.
In contrast to its typically taciturn white men, who deliver the standard assortment of gruff, racist stereotypes, High Ground offers passages set within the Indigenous community that have a rich sense of weight and cultural specificity. It's here, within a clan presided over by Grandfather Dharrpa — played by the film's co-storywriter, and senior cultural advisor, Witiyana Marika — that the film breathes with a sense of fury and purpose.
As the fiercely resolved warrior Gulwirri (Esmerelda Marimowa) tells Gutjuk, "Your anger is all you have."
These scenes have clearly been made with care — the filmmakers received the blessing of the land's traditional owners — and with a view to giving the Indigenous performers a significant point of view in the film.
The film's soundtrack, a mixture of largely organic natural sounds and traditional Indigenous music, also contributes to that sense of place. (Johnson has a long history of collaboration with Indigenous musicians, going back to his video clips for the band Yothu Yindi, of whom Marika was a founding member.)
Johnson and cinematographer Andrew Commis (Babyteeth) sure love their sweeping landscape vistas, cutting to such a dizzying number of drone shots that the film sometimes feels like it was funded by the tourist commission.
Yet there's a distinct sense — with the film's frequent recursion to images of native flora and fauna — of a wider universe indifferent to human squabbles; a world that will endure long after civilisation has vanished into time.
In both time-period and historically corrective vision, High Ground carries certain echoes of Warwick Thornton's Sweet Country, another film from Bunya Productions, the Australian company that has evolved into a sort of mini factory of genre films that wrangle issues of race (the outfit also gave us Ivan Sen's Mystery Road, and its sequel, Goldstone).
High Ground's complicated perspective, split between the Indigenous community and the bitter white settlers, feels fraught by design. Though the film's sense of tragedy is occasionally undermined by a recursion to rote, action-movie dialogue — particularly, and unfortunately noticeable during a climactic standoff — the narrative repetition reinforces the stalemate of a historical period in which there's more violence to come; never mind the notion of reconciliation.
In Travis, the film offers an avatar for a certain strand of white Australian history, where a national awakening has come about reluctantly, and lessons are learned the slow and painful way — even as it's underscored by an essential humanity.
"You know how civilisations are built, son?", Moran taunts Travis, in one of the film's more forced — yet no less provocative — moments. "Bad men doing bad things, clearing the way for others to follow."
The damage might be irreparable, the film suggests, but there's always time to change the future's course.
LoadingHigh Ground is in cinemas from January 28.
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2021-01-27 20:44:00Z
CBMiZmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIxLTAxLTI4L2hpZ2gtZ3JvdW5kLXJldmlldy1hcm5oZW0tbGFuZC1zdGVwaGVuLW1heHdlbGwtam9obnNvbi8xMzA4OTE2MtIBJ2h0dHBzOi8vYW1wLmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvYXJ0aWNsZS8xMzA4OTE2Mg
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