Mark Reviews Movies: TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 23, 2020

"Nothing you're about to see is true," says the opening text of the movie, before the last word remains to reveal the title: True History of the Kelly Gang. Of course, some of the story is, in the broadest sense of the word, true, like the basics. There was an Australian outlaw named Ned Kelly, who shot a police constable, killed three more with his gang later, and was arrested during a violent standoff with the police following a hostage situation at an isolated inn. Those are the facts, recreated in director Justin Kurzel's stylish but distancing work of speculative biography. As for the truth, who really knows what that is?

The concept of the truth, the movie seems to be arguing, goes deeper than the surface level of what happened, when it happened, and where it happened. The core of it is why things happened, and Shaun Grant's screenplay (based on Peter Carey's novel—not biography, it must be asserted) is trying to get that part of the truth. Here, we follow Ned Kelly as a boy (played by Orlando Schwerdt), who is pressured to become the man of the house and the provider for his family—by any means necessary—by a domineering mother, and as a young man (played by George MacKay), who tries to fight back against that pressure, until the world proves to him that there's no other path for him to take.

The story is presented in the form of an autobiography, with the adult Ned writing his story for a child he has yet to meet—and whom, the man suspects, he will never get a chance to meet. It's vital that a person writes his or her own story. The other option is that it will be written for the person. That's a lesson the boy Ned learns from Harry Power (Russell Crowe), a ruthless bushranger who teaches the kid important things like that, in addition to how to ambush a coach, to take advantage of a foe's weaknesses, and to pull the trigger when the time comes.

That section of the story, after the young Ned's mother Ellen (Essie Davis) sells her son into indentured servitude to Harry, puts forth, perhaps, the movie's central conundrum. There's some good that Harry teaches the boy—how to survive and why it's so vital to take control of one's own life. The boy's mother is also right in a way—that a family must stick together in order to make things work. Harry, though, robs and murders people. Ellen encourages her sons to do the same, despite the fact that doing so puts the family in peril. You can fight the world, but eventually, it starts fighting back.

This is mostly to say that Ned's story is presented as an unsolvable paradox. He has his reasons for eventually turning to crime—the abject poverty of his and his family's situation, the manipulative and leeching ways of the system against the already downtrodden, the mounting belief that there is no way out of these circumstances. While he and his gang are robbing banks, Ned puts these ideas into a manifesto and demands the paper print them. The other side of Ned can be summed up with the final part of that demand: He threatens to murder the newspaper editor if the piece isn't published.

Grant and Kurzel's purpose is to trace Ned—who, within the context of the movie, exists in this strange, nebulous area of real person, folk hero, and wholly fictional character—starting as a relative innocent, manipulated by those in power over him, such as Harry and Sgt. O'Neil (Charlie Hunnam), who might have killed Ned's father to make the boy's mother available. The end point for the character is a cunning and revolutionary killer, motivated by the realization that some of those who hold power are exploiting him—while conveniently ignoring the one person who has been manipulating him for his entire life. Constable Fitzpatrick (Nicholas Hoult, engaging as a smiling villain) serves as the representation of the system during Ned's adult years, while Mary (Thomasin McKenzie), who becomes Ned's lover (although he has a deeper connection to one of his male friends), represents the promise of a different, more peaceful life.

It's certainly a complex character arc, filled with as many contradictions as there are straightforward through lines. Kurzel's approach to the tale attempts to match that complexity (There's an elliptical nature to key scenes, such as Ned's final confrontation with the antagonist of his short adulthood), those paradoxes (Ned and his gang are tough but wear dresses while performing their crimes), and the lead character's rebellious spirit (The movie's overall design simultaneously evokes the styles of the late-1800s and those of 1980s punk rock). The movie's attitude, challenging our pre-conceived notions of such period fare, certainly aids in evading any black-and-white interpretation of Ned.

It also, though, too often gets in the way of the movie's aims as a study of this character and an examination of the complicated nature of the truth. To be clear, True History of the Kelly Gang is a daring and subversive re-writing of both history and folklore, but its style is more of an impediment to the movie's potential depth than a complement to it.

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