Sydney film festival 2021ReviewWhile it doesn’t always hit the mark, Leah Purcell’s Indigenous feminist reimagining of Henry Lawson’s classic is a bullet between the eyes of a whitewashed fable
“Cross me and I’ll kill ya,” says a steely Molly Johnson as she grips and aims her shotgun in the first act of Leah Purcell’s riveting debut feature film, The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson.
In her postcolonial reworking of Henry Lawson’s 1892 short story, being unsparing is a necessary trait for survival. The film’s take on the western is a chance to squarely point a bullet right between the eyes of the whitewashed Australian outback fable.
It’s 1893, and up high in the New South Wales Snowy Mountains lives heavily pregnant Molly (as well as starring as the hardened bushwoman, Purcell wrote and directed the film) in a shoddy hut with her four young children. Her husband Joe is often away for months droving sheep, but Molly is fiercely protective in his absence: at the first sign of a threat she’s in front of her hut, gun cocked.
This is the third time Purcell has adapted Lawson’s colonial classic about a nameless wife waiting, against the harsh frontier of the Australian bushland, with her dog “Alligator” for her husband to return. It follows on from her award-winning 2016 Belvoir Street Theatre play and subsequent 2019 novel of the same name. In rewriting Lawson’s colonial classic, Purcell was inspired by her own lived experiences and ancestral history, and she has used the original story as a basis for her own clear-eyed reimagining through an Indigenous feminist lens. In this third – cinematic – incarnation, Purcell’s supreme acting takes centre stage (the weary flickers of her facial expressions clue us into the deep anguish of Molly’s past), and while the adaptation is ambitious, it is at times tonally misguided.
As in all three of Purcell’s adaptions, she has fleshed out the existing characters from Lawson’s story and created new ones along the way – with varying results. There’s the introduction of Louisa (Jessica De Gouw), the London-bred wife of a new lawmaker Sergeant Nate Clintoff (Sam Reid), who writes in the town’s magazine on “battered women’s” rights; and a fugitive Aboriginal man, Yadaka (Rob Collins), who stumbles on to Molly’s farm, a character fleetingly painted in Lawson’s prose as a deceptive, silly figure, but in Purcell’s script plays a pivotal, hero-like role to the Johnson family.
As in Warwick Thornton’s 2017 film Sweet Country and Jennifer Kent’s 2019 The Nightingale, Purcell’s revisionist period drama is unflinching in depicting the harsh realities of justice for Indigenous people in the late 19th century. Purcell’s version leaves few notes of subtlety to decipher Molly’s brutal struggles in this dry bush environment, foregrounding issues of small-town racism and domestic violence with a searing, albeit heavy-handed, touch.
The relationship between Yadaka and Molly is the film’s most moving, as the pair slowly gain each another’s trust: she uneasily removes his neck shackle, and later he reveals knowledge about her blood lineage that opens up the truth of her cultural identity.
With the film’s visual metaphors and inclination to veer towards melodrama, it’s easy to picture Purcell’s story working more successfully on stage, or through first-person reflections in its novel format. The screen adaptation is stunning in visual scale, but doesn’t quite locate the fine balance needed to juggle the theatricality of the drama and the action-packed tropes of the western thriller.
The underdeveloped storylines barrel towards a rushed third act, as the rousing suspicions increase around the mysterious disappearance of Molly’s husband, and Nate opens up an investigation into the murder of a neighbouring drover and wife. The secondary drama unfolding in the rural town of Everton, which involves Louisa’s progressive politics on women’s rights and Nate’s gradual villainous turn, aren’t afforded the proper time to deftly intertwine with Molly’s plight for survival in the mountains.
Purcell’s directorial grasp is much more confident in the overall look of the film, rendering it a majestic cinematic quality against the story’s intensifying violence. Cinematographer Mark Wareham indulges in the romantic backdrop of the Australian alpine ranges and never-ending skylines, switching comfortably to capture the stuffy, smoky interiors of Everton. Salliana Seven Campbell’s jangly piano and violin-dominant score often intrudes over the film’s quieter moments, but is more effective in adding sweeping scope to the imagery, while providing a lumbering menace to the threats coming Molly’s way.
But it’s Purcell’s powerhouse performance that lends the film its punchier, gritty edge. In the press notes, the writer-director-actor muses on the film having its “own Songline” – with her spiritual force passing down the stories and cultural practice of ancient traditions. Although the screen adaptation doesn’t always hit the mark, Purcell has now completed the “trilogy” of The Drover’s Wife with vigour, and in turn has reclaimed Molly Johnson as her own.
The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson screened at the Sydney film festival and is released in the UK on 13 May.
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