Is the truth relevant in myth-making?
At the end of the day the fence were still not complete but my family had witnessed my new strength and they I could be the man.
- Peter Carey; True History of the Kelly Gang (2000)
And here is the thing about them men they was Australians they knew full well the terror of the unyielding law the historic memory of UNFAIRNESS were in their blood and a man might be a bank clerk or an overseer he might never have been lagged for nothing but still he knew in his heart what it were to be forced to wear the white hood in prison he knew what it were to be lashed for looking a warder in the eye and even a posh fellow like the Moth had breathed that air so the knowledge of unfairness were deep in his bone and marrow.
- Peter Carey; True History of the Kelly Gang (2000)
Based on Peter Carey's 2000 novel, written for the screen by Shaun Grant (Berlin Syndrome; Jasper Jones), and directed by Justin Kurzel (Snowtown; Macbeth), ironically enough given its title, True History of the Kelly Gang is a film about lies. More specifically, it looks at the pivotal role lies play in cultural myth-making, how every myth is a fiction, a subjective interpretation and reframing of real events, oftentimes with the goal of inflating a person's reputation, oftentimes with the goal of diminishing it. Importantly, as with the novel on which it's based, True History is a work of historical fiction which invents characters and incidents, weaving such elements into what we know of the facts pertaining to Ned Kelly. Easily the best filmic depiction of the Kelly Gang, True History is rugged, fierce, bleak, sexually ambiguous, and psychologically exhausting, with universally exceptional acting and some quite stunning cinematography. Acknowledging Kelly as an important symbol in Australian cultural identity, the film occupies a kind of middle ground between condemning him as a sociopathic murderer and celebrating him as a passionate freedom fighter. It takes itself very seriously, which will probably put off those looking for more casual entertainment along the lines of Gregor Jordan's rather bland Ned Kelly (2003), but if you're in the mood for something complex, challenging, and esoteric, you could certainly do worse than True History.
Divided into three sections ("Boy", "Man", and "Monitor"), the film features a voiceover throughout wherein Kelly is writing a memoir for his daughter, so she can know the man behind the myth. In 1867, 12-year-old Ned Kelly (an exceptional Orlando Schwerdt) lives with his mother Ellen (a ferocious Essie Davis), his perpetually drunk father, John 'Red' Kelly (Gentle Ben Corbett), and his two younger siblings. Life is hard, and things aren't helped by Sgt. O'Neill (Charlie Hunnam proving once again he can't do accents; I think he's supposed to be Welsh), who Red allows to have sex with Ellen. Although she's fiercely protective of her children, she despises Red, as does Ned himself, to whom she is extremely close (yep, there's an Oedipal undertone to the first act). When Red dies in prison, Ned steps up to become the man of the house, but Ellen sends him to travel with, Harry Power (a Falstaffian Russell Crowe), a notorious bushranger. However, when Ned discovers that Ellen sold him to Power, he runs away. Years later, Ned (a very tactile George MacKay) returns and tries to earn an honest living as a bare knuckle boxer. After meeting the hedonistic Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick (a slimy Nicolas Hoult), Ned is introduced to Mary Hearn (the always exceptional Thomasin McKenzie), with whom he begins a relationship. Although he and Fitzpatrick are friends, when the womanising Fitzpatrick sets his sights on Ned's sister, Kate (Josephine Blazier), the friendship breaks down, and Kelly finds himself on the run, accompanied by his close friend and possible lover Joe Byrne (Sean Keenan), his brother Dan (Earl Cave), and Dan's friend Steve Hart (Louis Hewison). Recruiting young men fed up with British colonialism, Ned forms the Kelly Gang, and as their reputation grows, the authorities determine to hunt them down at all costs.
Much of the detail in True History is fabricated, as it was in the novel. For example, Mary is a fictitious character, and as far as we know, Kelly had no children. The film's Fitzpatrick is also quite different from the real person, whose reputation has seen some improvement in recent scholarship. Additionally, Fitzpatrick had no relationship with Kate. The depiction of Ellen is also fictitious – in the film, she's a fiercely proud pillar of the community, but in reality, she was disliked and most people shunned her. Another fabrication is the Kelly Gang's tendency to proclaim themselves, "The Sons of Sieve". This is a reference to a fictitious Irish secret society working to undermine the English occupation of Ireland. When Kelly learns he's a descendent from one of its founders, it stokes his nationalist pride, and the Gang adopt it as their battle cry.
Perhaps the most controversial fictional element concerns Kelly's sexuality. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been any scholarly suggestion that Kelly was anything other than heterosexual, but in both the book and the film, he's presented in a manner that seems to hint at bisexuality. The scene where we first meet Joe, for example, sees him and Kelly playfully wrestling for a book, a scene which ends with Kelly lying atop Joe, their faces only centimetres apart. Later, Kelly and Fitzpatrick sit beside one another in a brothel, Fitzpatrick completely naked, Kelly stripped down to his underwear, and the two have a very frank conversation during which the homoerotic chemistry is undeniable. And for what it's worth, while we're on this subject, it's also hinted that Fitzpatrick might be into bestiality. Whatever you want to make of the validity of these undertones, what they accomplish in the context of the film is to challenge, if not necessarily undermine, the rugged heteromasculinity of the Kelly myth.
The issue of lies, myth-making, and fabrication is introduced immediately, with the opening caption telling us, "nothing you are about to see is true". Subsequently, one of the first lines of dialogue is Kelly warning his daughter about people who will "confuse fiction for fact", saying that the only account she can accept as true is his own, because "every man should be the author of his own history". Of course, Kelly doesn't stop to consider that a first-hand account is just as susceptible to exaggeration, embellishment, and outright lying as something written by a third party. And the irony in all of this is that in real life, Kelly never wrote such a manuscript for his daughter because he never had a daughter, thus creating more layers atop the dichotomy of calling the film "True History" and immediately asserting none of it is true.
The film is well-aware how legends are propagated throughout communities, especially oppressed communities, and how such legends eventually acquire mythical and/or symbolic status. In this process, truth is rarely a priority; as newspaper editor Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young) says in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend". True History is partly about how the legend of Ned Kelly became 'fact'.
One of the points of Carey's novel, and something very much reproduced in the film, is the malleability of history, the notion that history isn't a fixed monolithic thing, but that it changes with each act of interpretation. For example, the official record states that Kelly's last words were "such is life", but historians have often questioned the veracity of this claim. In both the novel and film, Kelly doesn't say this, in fact, he doesn't say anything, maintaining a steely silence to the end. In this sense, both Carey and Kurzel reject the official record and go with a different version, illustrating the protean nature of history. Of course, this is a theme throughout the film, with the prime example being Kelly's status as a symbol, the importance of which grows and proliferates in a manner relatively divorced from actual events. As Joe says to Kelly, "you can fool the others into believing you're Jesus Christ, but I know that none of this is work of God", or as Fitzpatrick taunts him, "you're not the man you pretend to be". This is also something touched on in Mel Gibson's Braveheart (1995), a film with a very tenuous relationship to history. At one point, there's a montage of various people mythologising William Wallace (Gibson), in effect granting him ever more ridiculous superpowers, and later on, Wallace himself jokes about some of the things with which he's been accredited. It's the same idea in True History, although Kurzel handles it with a lot more gravitas.
What's especially interesting in all of this is that the film sits somewhere between the two extremes of Kelly scholarship – a hero for the common man or a psychopathic murderer. For example, although he goes some way to explain Kelly's violent tendencies, tracing it back to a bad childhood and years of British oppression, Kurzel does not shy away from one of the most notorious incidents of Kelly's story – his 1878 murder of three policemen at Stringybark Creek, all of them unarmed, two of them in cold-blood after they'd already surrendered. This incident is depicted in all its squalor and depravity, and forms the content of the film's second-best scene, giving us a thoroughly brutal depiction, blood-soaked, barbaric, and wantonly violent. The Ned Kelly seen here is a savage – he's nothing like the mythical pseudo-Robin Hood of folktale nor the anti-establishment punk played by Mike Jagger in Tony Richardson's Ned Kelly (1970) nor the charming rogue played by Heath Ledger in Jordan's film – he's a violent blood-thirsty sociopath who kills because he enjoys it. In this sense, he recalls the depiction of Dan 'Mad Dog' Morgan in Alfred Rolfe's 1911 film of the same name. Although it's now a lost film, we know from contemporary reviews that Rolfe himself played the titular character, depicting him as dangerously mercurial and possibly insane, both of which we could say about MacKay's Kelly.
Aesthetically, there's a lot to praise here. Alice Babidge's costumes, for example, are anachronistic, but purposefully so, engaging with the theme of the mutability of history, and in any case, there's not a single costume in the film that feels inauthentic to the tone Kurzel is going for. And Babidge works especial wonders in creating the Kelly Gang's infamous bullet-resistant armour. Karen Murphy's production design is also excellent, really capturing the squalor in which Kelly grew up, and contrasting it later on with the opulent surroundings familiar to Fitzpatrick.
However, the film's real ace-in-the-hole is the mesmeric cinematography by the hugely talented Ari Wegner, which is some of the best I've seen in years. Having already done incredible work on William Oldroyd's Lady Macbeth and Peter Strickland's In Fabric, her work here is in another realm entirely. Take the opening shot; a drone shot pointing directly down at a snow-covered forest, the trees of which are dead. From the bottom of the frame, a horse gallops into view, the brilliant red of the rider's cloak standing out starkly against the white of the snow and the black trees. Her real pièce de résistance, however, is the climactic shootout at Glenrowan, with Kelly, Joe, Dan, and Steve holed up in a small building with their hostages as an army of police move ever closer. Wegner works too many wonders to fully catalogue them here, but three moments stood out for me. The first happens as the police approach the hut, and there's a shot of them carrying torches in the pitch dark, which Wegner impressionistically renders as literally turning the men luminescent. The second is a POV shot from inside Kelly's helmet, with only a tiny slit to see through; it's chaotic, confusing, disorientating, and claustrophobic. We can hear the battle, the bullets bouncing off the armour, but we can't see much of anything, and the shot (the only one of its kind in the film) does a brilliant job of putting us in Kelly's shoes for just a moment. The third shot is a simple but beautiful image of the hut burning, the flames highlighted against the pitch-black night. I honestly can't praise Wegner's work enough. If you appreciate good cinematography that tends a little toward the impressionistic, you should definitely watch this scene. It's absolutely Oscar-worthy. Which means it has zero chance of winning Wegner an Oscar.
Which brings me to problems, of which I found very few. As already mentioned, Hunnam's accent is hilariously bad, but he's only in the first act so it's not too distracting. The film is also a little slow in places, and could perhaps do with losing about 10-15 minutes. Don't get me wrong, the Glenrowan scene is worth the wait, but some viewers probably won't have the patience to get that far, and I have to admit, the narrative did start to drag in a couple of places. And, as I already said, those expecting something in the vein of Jordan's 2003 film will be sorely disappointed (although that's not the film's fault – it's not trying to be akin to previous Kelly movies).
Starkly beautiful, psychologically taxing, thematically complex, this is very much a return to form for Kurzel after the debacle that was Assassin's Creed (2016). Acknowledging the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of getting to the reality of such a widely known symbol as Ned Kelly, the film suggests that in the formation of such myths, truth is jettisoned very early. At the same time, it suggests that this may not necessarily be a bad thing – if even history itself is open to reformulation, then why not so with myths? Why not let the legend supersede the fact? Does truth matter all that much when dealing with something as significant as a national mythos?