By Jake Wilson
THE NEW BOY ★★★★
(M) 116 minutes
One message of Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy is not to leap to conclusions about what you’re dealing with. That seems like the best approach in addressing the film itself, in all ways sufficiently out of the ordinary that usual standards of judgment scarcely apply.
Cate Blanchett plays Sister Eileen in The New Boy, directed by Warwick Thornton.
Thornton has said the script draws on his own unhappy experiences as a Kaytetye boy from Alice Springs, from where he was sent at age of 11 to a Western Australian boarding school run by Benedictine monks. But this is not a realistic film, but a fable, with echoes of numerous earlier stories told in Australian cinema, though not so often by Indigenous directors.
The setting is outback Australia during the Second World War, the same period as Baz Luhrmann’s Australia; the unnamed boy of the title is an Indigenous boy played with what appears to be a total lack of artifice by first-time actor Aswan Reid.
Captured by the authorities, he’s left at a tin-roofed orphanage that’s run by the sturdy Sister Eileen (Cate Blanchett, also a producer) with a couple of Indigenous offsiders – a nun known as Sister Mum (Deborah Mailman) and hired hand George (Wayne Blair).
Wayne Blair (left) as George and Aswan Reid as The New Boy.
He’s a mystery, this boy, to his new caregivers and to us. We see the intelligence and curiosity in his roaming gaze, but can only occasionally guess at his thoughts. For quite a long way into the film he doesn’t speak, which might lead us to suppose he’s mute, or has no language of his own.
Neither assumption proves correct, but the boy remains an outsider, whatever efforts are made to bring him into the fold. He opts to sleep beneath the bed rather than on top of it; he looks on patiently while Sister Mum mimes how to use the outdoor dunny, but it isn’t his way.
He’s also a golden boy, literally and otherwise: his yellow hair is the colour of the surrounding wheat fields, so he could duck into them and hide forever. He knocks out a bully with a single blow, and from a Christian perspective could be called a miracle worker, though the label may not really be the right one. “I know what that boy is,” George says eventually. But he doesn’t spell it out.
Sister Eileen has her own complexities (not that Sister Mum or George are simpler, although this again is a conclusion we might jump to). The danger here is that Blanchett’s star presence might overpower everything else; at the same time, the film couldn’t possibly be what it is without her.
None of the cliches about repressed or neurotic nuns apply: where the new boy is largely silent, all the layers of Sister Eileen’s character are audible in her voice, which is bright and brisk in the manner of those accustomed to talking to children, but also carries the down-to-earth assurance of someone who enjoys being a leader and does it well.
The core of what happens in The New Boy could have been told much more briefly, and its meaning, taken allegorically, is clear to the point of starkness. But the real drama is in Thornton’s style, always lyrical but never fluidly so: smoothness in this context would be impossible, since we’re never comfortably aligned with any one character.
Nor can we easily judge what perceptions they might share, any more than Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ sometimes too-richly orchestrated score binds everything together, or Blanchett, for all her virtuosity, is allowed to take full command. The New Boy is the story of an encounter, but one which in a sense never quite happens. What Thornton appears to be telling us is that the gaps remain.
The New Boy is in cinemas from June 6.
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