Doug Morrissey: Ned in a dress is skirting around Kelly’s brutality
The bizarre new film about Ned Kelly depicts a beardless bushranger in a dress but however the killer is shown, we can’t ignore his basic brutality, writes Doug Morrissey.
Opinion
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On Australia Day, Aussie director Justin Kurzel’s True History of the Kelly Gangpremieres on Stan. It is a dark melodrama with Ned and his mates dressed in women’s clothing, like the fictional Sons of Sieve, described as cross-dressing Irish rebels.
Cross-dressing and gender bending themes are showcased throughout the film. There is plenty of blood and guts, unbridled sexual titillation and over-the-top performances.
Russell Crowe plays a scruffy Harry Power, who trains young Ned in highway robbery.
Ned’s mother Ellen, played by Essie Davis (Kurzel’s wife), is Power’s lover and an Irish harpy sly grog seller.
Nicholas Hoult’s performance as the scapegoated Constable Fitzpatrick borders on farce and there is a barely repressed sexual tension between Ned and Fitzpatrick. Is any of this movie make-believe necessary or of any relevance to the movie’s central characters?
Englishman George Mackay plays a beardless Ned fighting against evil squatters, a corrupt police force and tyrannical English government. The loss of Ned’s rebel beard is puzzling.
Perhaps it was decided a beard would detract from actor’s good looks.
Mackay can be seen wearing an embroidered black lace negligee in the Glenrowan lightshow downfall, which makes the whole trancelike scene seem ridiculous. I think we all know what Ned would have thought of the loss of his beard, of cross dressing and the questioning of his masculinity.
Pre-release publicity described the movie as “set against the Badlands of colonial Australia where the English rule with a bloody fist and the Irish endure. Nurtured by the notorious bushranger Harry Power and fuelled by the unfair arrest of his mother, Ned Kelly recruits a wild bunch of warriors to plot one of the most audacious attacks of anarchy and rebellion the country has ever seen. Loved by the people, feared by his enemies and carved in history, Ned Kelly is more than a Robin Hood, he is a f---ing legend”.
This is myth piled on myth with history being whatever you want it to be.
Stan does advertise Kurzel’s film ”as an epic, fictionalised retelling of the life of legendary Australian bushranger Ned Kelly.” Fictionalised yes, but the film is not a retelling of Kelly’s life as a criminal and bushranger. Ned and his family stole horses and livestock from rich and poor people alike, regardless of race or religion.
They intimidated and terrorised the community and shot dead three policemen in an ambush. Proclaimed outlaws, the Kelly Gang robbed two banks and in desperation planned to derail a train and slaughter its passengers. If it had succeeded, Ned would be seen today as a mass murderer rather than a hero to be admired.
Kurzel bases his film on Peter Carey’s award-winning novel of the same name. Carey said of his book “it’s the most invented, made-up book I’ve ever written”. Kurzel praised Carey’s book, saying “it always felt like the true spirit of Ned Kelly. Unsentimental, brutal, raw and visceral”.
In other words it’s myth, legend and make-believe which deifies a self-promoting outlaw with blood on his hands and evil in his heart.
Kurzel’s gloomy film embraces the Kelly myth, while pretending to penetrate to the emotional and psychological core of the narcissistic outlaw’s personality. But it is neither truthful, compelling or believable. It deals in stereotypes and fanciful creations.
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The film’s moral compass is skewed, pandering to a national myth of rebellious criminality. I don’t think there is anything about this self-absorbed and predictable film that warrants a single viewing.
If you want to experience the unvarnished truth behind the Kelly legend, visit the recently completed Victorian Police Memorial site at Stringybark Creek. There you can read the words of the murdered policemen’s families and learn of the anguished widows and fatherless orphans left behind. Ned Kelly was no a f---ing legend. — he was a predatory livestock thief, a killer and would-be mass murderer.
Doug Morrissey’s Ned Kelly: Selectors, Squatters and Stock Thieves was published by Connor Court in 2018. His Ned Kelly: A Lawless Life was short-listed for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Australian History in 2016.