True History of the Kelly Gang movie review (2020)
As staged by Kurzel, the self-sacrificing, all-encompassing love that certain characters express for each other becomes magnetically erotic, even when there's no narrative likelihood that they'll actually have sex. Whenever Ned gazes into the eyes of his mother Ellen (Essie Davis), who sold her body to support her kids and then sold Ned himself, and whether we're seeing Ned as a boy or a man, we always get a sense of modified Oedipal longing, with the son subconsciously wishing to possess the mother in order to protect her from degradation at the hands of another man (or men). Often their faces are positioned so close together that it creates an unsettling tension. This is how characters are blocked onscreen when they're about to start making out.
And even though Ned eventually falls in love with a young sex worker named Mary (Thomasin McKenzie) who has a young child, his purest and most satisfying emotional relationship is with his "best mate" Joe Byrne (Sean Keenan). Ned and Joe unselfconsciously embrace, often prone and sometimes spooning. Their posture simultaneously suggests lovers enjoying a rest after sex, and a pair of very young boys who don't think it's unnatural to hug that way because they haven't been taught homophobia yet.
"True History" is a bit of a mess, with alternately too-fragmented and too-compressed storytelling—for instance, when the time comes for Ned to have an outlaw gang, he just suddenly has one, and we're deprived of the surefire pleasure that gang-building sequences in these movies always deliver. (The credits list nearly twenty people as members of "The Kelly Army"; none have names.) And as much thought has been put into the film's psychological and mythical architecture, it's a bit anemic when it comes to historical particulars. (For all its fixation on the resentment of white immigrant settlers and former convicts against the British, aboriginals are barely seen or discussed.)
And it should go without saying that if you're looking for a historically rigorous account of Ned Kelly's life and times, you should look elsewhere. Aside from a few key moments, the filmmakers are no more faithful to the particulars of history than John Ford was to the story of Wyatt Earp in "My Darling Clementine," or Shakespeare to Julius Caesar. Still, this is a wild swing that connects. It's myth-making, splattered in blood, scored with an electric guitar, and enacted with such brazen bigness that you wouldn't be surprised if the cast assembled for a curtain call at the end.
"True History of the Kelly Gang" is available on Digital and VOD today, 4/24.
