The Convert: There’s a ceremonial haka ... and then there's a real one
When two Maori tribes square up for battle, stamping their feet, beating their chests and sticking out their tongues, it is a turning point in this film.
If you’re even vaguely familiar with rugby union you will know about haka, the Maori war dance the New Zealand All Blacks perform before each match. Well, there’s a ceremonial haka and then there’s a real one, as Kiwi director Lee Tamahori shows to savage effect in the colonial drama The Convert.
When two Maori tribes square up for battle, stamping their feet, beating their chests and sticking out their tongues, it is a turning point in this film, which is only the third one Tamahori has made on home soil.
“When war comes, they’re all warriors,’’ notes Charlotte (Jacqueline McKenzie), an ex-convict who lives in a British settlement in 1830s New Zealand. That line is a nod to Tamahori’s celebrated 1994 debut feature, Once Were Warriors, where the sites of violence are not the battlefield but the pub and the home, and the main victims are women.
Tamahori went to Hollywood and made Mulholland Falls (1996), Along Came a Spider (2001) and the 20th James Bond movie Die Another Day (2002), starring Pierce Brosnan. In 2016 he made his second NZ-set film, the 1950s family drama Mahana, released internationally as The Patriarch.
The patriarchs in The Convert are the chiefs of two warring Maori tribes, each armed with the major British import: muskets. Standing between them is a lay preacher, Thomas Munro (Guy Pearce), who is newly arrived at the trading outpost.
“If you’ve come here to win souls for Jesus, you’re going to be busy,’’ remarks the ship captain. “They’re everywhere,’’ one of the sailors warns of the Maori. “They’re there even when you can’t see them.”
Early on, Munro intervenes in a Maori confrontation, saves the life of a young woman, Rangimai (Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne), and takes her into his care. She, however, having seen her husband killed, is bent on revenge.
Munro’s past life gradually emerges. He is familiar with the brutality of war. When a local shopkeeper asks him, “How else can this end except in fire and blood?”, he is almost preaching to the converted.
Except Munro is a convert, at least at the outset, to god and to peace. It’s the latter to which he most wants to convert the Maori tribes, to stop the summary executions and to avoid wholesale bloodshed.
The other conversion is even harder: to persuade the British settlers to treat the Maoris as equals, and vice-versa.
There is the potential for trouble. A settler’s daughter likes the look of a young Maori warrior-to-be.
Pearce is solid as a man who feels he must keep his emotions in check, with the settlers who consider the Maoris “barbaric savages”, and with the Maoris who believe in blood for blood. When he walks into a meeting with their leaders, he needs to look past severed heads hanging from the ceiling.
Ngatai-Melbourne, who made her debut in Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), is impressive as a young woman who wants to do the opposite to her white preacher-guardian. She wants to let her emotions run free and stake her claim on her land.
This film, directed and co-written by Tamahori, is based on the 2011 novel Wulf by NZ writer Hamish Clayton. It starts a little ponderously, as the time and place is set and the characters are fleshed out, but once that haka happens it becomes a gripping historical drama about how faith can be tested in expected and unexpected ways.
The Convert (MA15+)
119 minutes
In cinemas
★★★