And so the four-wheel drive keeps on turning. The outback road movie seems to be returning to the uneasy aesthetic of Ted Kotcheff and Peter Weir in the 1970s. When THE ROVER was released in 2014, there was a strain of critical opinion that appraised it as an existential art-house variant on MAD MAX. With a cast headed by the ever-intense Guy Pearce (whose Australian director on THE PROPOSITION, John Hillcoat, went to the US to take the apocalyptic road movie to its highest or lowest point in THE ROAD), its an ensemble piece with elements of noir, dystopian SF and a darkly dreamlike tone. Ah... says Jay Slater of the critical plaudits, tempted to lavish a little praise for once, to an extent I can see what theyre driving at. Its a film that had so much potential. Indeed, director David Michôd is hard-edged Australian cinemas current golden boy, his 2010 debut ANIMAL KINGDOM, starring Pearce, is an underbelly expo of Melbourne crime family loyalties. Guy Pearce is fantastic; Robert Pattinson, to a degree, does well. Thrown together by random violent events in a near-lawless future outback, the TWILIGHT heartthrob plays the psychologically-vulnerable Rey, younger brother to two loose-cannon armed thieves who forms an uneasy bond with volatile loner Eric (Pearce) a drifter we at first assume to be the rover of the title. Its quite a captivating film, concedes our commentator, Australia collapsing, society-wise. Indeed, and the social apocalypse doesnt require anything as devastating as a nuclear bomb, or even George Millers oil shortage. Instead its our old friend the economic downturn the same one weve all been living through, but ten years hence and following through to a bitter conclusion. The financial collapse has turned Australia into a Wild West frontier town. As Michôd observes of his bleak social vision, people from all corners of the world have come out to the desert to scrape out an existence. Petty criminals and miscreants and hustlers. The convincingly-observed milieu can also, depending on personal temperament, make you sympathise with desperate men. Until the last minute, insists Slater. You get the twist where he buries his dog at the end, and it doesnt work. I dont know if the filmmaker thought he was being clever but it ultimately destroys the narrative and the time youve invested in the movie. This reservation seems to be all thats holding him back from the unequivocal praise his book may lavish on WAKE IN FRIGHT or PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK. But in this writers opinion, the plot twist that makes a dead rover the catalyst for so much violence is only a flaw if, say, Kevin Spacey fabricating the plot of THE USUAL SUSPECTS (1995) is a cheat, or its a letdown that Warren Oates never knows what hes killing and dying for in BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974). Cinema is the illuminating light of deception, projected at a screen, and THE ROVER brings the glow of the southern hemisphere to that.
Writer/editor/ghost-writer transfixed by crime, cinema and the serrated edges of popular culture. Those similarly afflicted are invited to make contact.
