Snowtown
When
sexually abused, alienated teen Jamie (Lucas Pittaway) meets his mother Liz’s
(Louise Harris) charismatic new beau John Bunting (Daniel Henshall), life seems
to be looking up.
Poor
white trash, Jamie and his brothers eke out a miserable, precarious existence
in one of the more deprived, seedy areas of Adelaide, blighted by drug and
alcohol abuse, poverty and sexual abuse, preyed on by older siblings and
predatory kiddie fiddling neighbours.
Charming,
funny, generous and thoughtful, if a bit rough around the edges, John offers a
much-needed positive, masculine role model to Jamie and his brothers who are
sorely in need of a father figure.
With
a pathological hatred of paedophiles, bullies and wasters, it’s no wonder Jamie
sees in John a surrogate father and mentor; someone who’ll teach him to be a
man. John is exactly the kind of
fair dinkum, rugged individualist that built Australia and seems to be the
first adult male who seems genuinely interested in the vulnerable, damaged
Jamie who doesn’t want to bum him.
He’s
also a white-hot psychopath; the self-appointed, homophobic leader of his own
gang of vigilantes determined to cleanse Adelaide of paedos, fags, junkies and
other undesirables. What starts of
as a little harmless harassment of the local kiddie fiddler (throwing ice cream
cones at his house, daubing his porch with kangaroo guts) soon escalates into
more overt violence however as Jamie starts noticing a lot of people around the
neighbourhood have gone missing.
John has plans for Jamie though, big plans…
Based
on the horrific true story of the prolific gang of serial killers who shocked
Australia, Snowtown is one of the chilliest, most fundamentally bleak films you’ll
see this year.
It
also confirms every tenderly nursed, dark prejudice you may have that
Australian males are, by and large, an ill-educated, repellant shower of,
violent, murderous, misogynistic sociopaths.
While
I personally in no way condone or support this view of Antipodean masculinity,
if you’ve ever been in a Walkabout Inn at 1:30am and overheard an Aussie
sexually harass, I mean romance, a young lady with the words: “Don’t be such a snooty
cow, do you fancy a root or what?” you kinda start to suspect that John Bunting
may not be that much of an anomaly.
A
deceptively ordinary, blokey, alpha male, Bunting, played by the brilliant
Daniel Henshall, is a truly terrifying creation. Charming and charismatic, he’s a brash, swaggering
fantasist, convinced of his own righteousness, who starts out torturing and
murdering suspected paedophiles but soon widens his pool of potential victims,
targeting the lost, the lonely, the forgotten, the mentally disabled and the
emotionally vulnerable, victims of convenience, of opportunity. Slowly, deliberately, he seduces the
vulnerable, damaged teenage Jamie, drawing him into a sick sub-culture of
violence, murder and intimidation but Henshall is mesmerising in the role,
playing Bunting not as the monster but as the hero he obviously was in his own
head and, as such, becomes almost the closest thing to a sympathetic character
in the film, certainly its most attractive.
As
his teenage accomplice, Pittaway is staggeringly good. A damaged, victim-turned-victimiser, he
wanders through the film, sullen, numb, dead behind the eyes. As he’s sucked slowly in by Bunting and
becomes increasingly enamoured of the seductive power he comes to hold over
life and death, you watch with a hollow, sick feeling of dread as he selects,
researches and grooms prospective victims, hoping against hope for a moral and
spiritual awakening, for some form of redemption that never comes.
Slow-burning
and laid-back to the point of being horizontal, Snowtown throbs with a growing sense
of tension, dread and impending doom that never finds release and paints a
casually brutal vision of life on the margins in suburban Australia where
siblings beat and rape each other over the controls for the TV, the abused
become abusers and where mass serial murder is an open secret that’s not only
ignored but condoned by Bunting’s neighbours.
Dark,
violent and unrelentingly bleak, Justin Kurzel has fashioned a restrained,
subtle, powerful work suffused with a grim despair that evil can be quite so
banal.
David Watson
Director
Justin Kurzel
Cast
Lucas Pittaway, Daniel Henshall, Richard Green, Louise
Harris,
Country
Australia
Running time
119 minutes
Year
2011
Certificate
18
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