Rachel Ward: From Hollywood to the farm

For sheer dedication, nothing beats actor Rachel Ward’s encounter with dung beetles and cow poo.

Rachel Ward in a scene from Rachel's Farm

Rachel’s Farm (PG)
In cinemas
★★★★½

Rachel Ward is a passionate, determined woman. Born and raised in the English Cotswolds, she had a local connection from birth as the great-granddaughter of William Ward, 2nd Earl of Dudley, governor-general of Australia from 1908 to 1911. Following a successful modelling career, she moved to the United States and attracted notice in television commercials before receiving a Golden Globe nomination in 1981 for “New Star of the Year” for her distinctive performance in the durable Burt Reynolds action picture Sharky’s Machine – only her second film.

This led to a number of starring roles in such high-profile Hollywood films as Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) and Against All Odds (1984). In 1983, she co-starred in a popular yet ­unconvincing American TV miniseries adapted from Australian author Colleen McCullough’s novel The Thorn Birds. The only good thing to emerge from this farrago was that Ward’s co-star was the Australian actor Bryan Brown, whom she married in Oxfordshire in 1983.

Ward essentially gave up a Hollywood career to live with Brown in Australia. While filming The Umbrella Woman with the actor in the mid-1980s, she fell in love with, and they acquired a farm in, the Nambucca Valley in NSW.

For the next 30 years, Ward juggled her acting and, later, directing career with time on Rachel’s Farm. She left the running of the property to neighbouring farmer Nick Groom Sr, who, in common with traditional farming practices of the day, used chemicals and insecticides to control pests and weeds.

In recent years, Ward has devoted more and more time to the farm, which is now the focal point in her life, while becoming increasingly “concerned about the way the world is heading … and frightened by climate change”. To that end, she replaces Groom Sr with Groom Jr, who was and is well-versed in environmental sustainability and regenerative farming practice.

By this time, Ward and the younger Groom were the only labourers working the property, but when Nick Jr a keen motorbike enthusiast, was badly injured in an accident, it was left to Ward to literally carry the burden with her trademark passion and determination. To deepen her knowledge, she seeks advice from experts in the environmental field including Charles Massy, Peter Andrews and Tony Hill, as well as Indigenous man Kenny Walker and his passed-down knowledge of local grasses.

As she explained in one recent interview, she learned about the essential “livestock” below the ground in the soil (worms and such) as well as the actual livestock itself in the open-air paddocks above. For sheer dedication, nothing beats her encounter with dung beetles and cow poo.

Now a proud grandmother, Ward is even more committed to the environmental movement and her farm, which has become one of the state’s showpieces for responsible land use and quality of beef. Brown, while very supportive, is not actively involved with the day-to-day, though one of the couple’s daughters and partner actively participate. “We’re sort of halfway there,” she’s said of her ongoing journey towards a renewed balance of nature.

Ward’s directing of this, her third theatrical feature following the fiction films Beautiful Kate (2009) and Palm Beach (2019), is urgent and committed, pungently reflecting in documentary form the same intensity she has relied on throughout her eventful life.

You’ve got to believe in her latest and most important quest.

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Sisu (MA15+)
In cinemas
★★★

An opening title asserts that “sisu” is an untranslatable Finnish word alluding to “white-knuckle courage and almost unimaginable determination.” These are the qualities possessed by the grey-bearded hero Aatami (Jorma Tommila), a gold prospector who single-handedly takes on a convoy of vicious Nazis who are laying waste to parts of the country as they flee from the advancing Russians in 1944.

Divided into seven chapters, Sisu is distinguished by superb photography from Kjell Lagerroos, excellent staging and a preposterous plot. All alone, with only his rifle, his pony and his faithful dog, Aatami has just struck a seam of gold when the Nazi convoy, led by the sadistic Bruno (Aksel Hennie), arrives on the scene. With them are six Finnish “comfort women”. The old man looks like an easy victim to add to the list of the locals the Germans have killed, but Aatami is not nicknamed “The Immortal” for nothing – he is said to have killed 300 Russians. He is good with a knife, he can survive long periods underwater (while carrying a bag of gold!), winkles bullets out of his body, survives a hanging and even manages to clamour onboard a plane that has just taken off with Bruno on board, paving the way for a climax inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964).

It’s all very silly, but it’s so over-the-top that it becomes blissfully entertaining. The violence – consisting of a great deal of blood and gore – seldom lets up. The film is spoken in English, mainly, with some Finnish dialogue with English subtitles near the end.

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Simulant (M)
In cinemas
★★

The Canadian sci-fi thriller Simulant has a familiar plot going right back to the far more visionary Blade Runner (1982). With all the discussion about Artificial Intelligence of late, it would seem timely to release a new film on the subject. But Simulant is less intelligent than artificial.

Androids are quite common in this future world and though manufactured by the private Nexxera company are subject to tight government controls. When Evan (Robbie Amell), the husband of artist Faye (Jordana Brewster) is killed in a car crash, he’s replaced by a “sim” lookalike – but it’s not the same. Meanwhile, Casey (Simu Liu), a cunning hacker, wants to liberate all the “sims” in the world and Agent Kessler (Sam Worthington) is out to stop him.

There are some intriguing moments, but there’s also a lack of clarity, especially early on. It’s a thankless role for Worthington, and though Brewster is appealing as the troubled Faye, the script treats its characters with a bleakness apropos to their snowbound milieu. April Mullen’s direction feels a bit counterfeit, a nearly lifeless replicant of at least one much better film.