![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The true review of Ned Kelly
It was an all-around pleasant crowd yesterday, but it was a particularly pleasant surprise to have one of my Famous Author Friends show up full of anecdote. I mentioned offhand my amateur editing attempts with my father's memoirs and we springboarded from that to the incestuous world of literary journalism and his role in it. He had a heartwarming story about a negative review of a recent novel from an aging midlister turning into a positive review of his œuvre as a whole, but overall the glimpses of how the sausage gets made I've been getting from him, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nihilistic_kid, and others have been (as I told the Old Man over this morning's austerity breakfast) "both (a) revealing and (b) incredibly depressing". On the plus side, no one is ever going to pay me a sou for my babblings here--not even in kind--so your faith in my impartiality can remain bedrock.
A year ago, when I was reading Peter Carey's deservedly acclaimed The true history of the Kelly Gang, I was surprised to discover a major biopic starring Heath Ledger, which I promptly added to our NetFlix queue and almost as promptly forgot about. Now that we're at least working our way through this again, it came up. Unfortunately, the film is not based on Carey's Ned Kelly novel but on Robert Drewe's (Our Sunshine, 2003). Maybe that's unfair--not having read it, I can't say for sure it's an inferior work, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't entirely director Gregor Jordan's idea to insert a bodice-ripping romance between Kelly and an English gentlewoman. Thankfully, although that was pivotal to the plot, it didn't dominate it.
Overall, I was less impressed by the lead actors than I was by the secondary cast. The best you can say about Orlando Bloom is that he doesn't screw up any of the scenes he's in. Geoffrey Rush phones it in and Ledger appears to be so intimidated by the legendary stature of Kelly in Australian history, folklore, and national identity that he it ends up making him wooden. I was more moved by Joel Edgerton's conflicted role as a police informer; the death scene of Ned's younger brother Dan (portrayed by Dublin-born Laurence Kinlan) had me in tears. Naomi Watts hardly registered as the gentlewoman, but Kris McQuade as Kelly's mother--Oh. My God. Just looking into her eyes reveals the suffering of four centuries of English subjugation and if her voice was any more gravelly you could pave a road with it.
[Linguistic note: As the name suggests, the Kellys are an Irish family, but Ledger never quite nails the accent. You can tell throughout that he's someone whose native speech is non-rhotic trying to put the r's in. This might've worked given that Kelly was actually a native of Victoria, but it doesn't make sense for the older of two brothers to sound more assimilated (though, of course, you could say the fault is really Kinlan's for not trying to sound more Aussie). After making himself indistiguishable from a native-born Wyomingan in Brokeback Mountain, I had higher hopes.]
It's a competent retelling of Kelly's exploits, though I don't think it paints as powerful a picture of the toll exacted by being born into an oppressive society where you will be end up being treated as a criminal no matter what you do as Carey's novel. The role of the Black trackers is predictably minimised; I don't recall seeing any at all during the Siege of Glenrowan. The bloodthirstiness of the police forces there is also a bit exaggerated; only two hostages died in the shooting, but the movie makes it look like at least a dozen. (Of course, if anything, the film makes the attack look more organised than the "fearfully bungled" operation described by eyewitnesses.)
nihilistic_kid, and others have been (as I told the Old Man over this morning's austerity breakfast) "both (a) revealing and (b) incredibly depressing". On the plus side, no one is ever going to pay me a sou for my babblings here--not even in kind--so your faith in my impartiality can remain bedrock.A year ago, when I was reading Peter Carey's deservedly acclaimed The true history of the Kelly Gang, I was surprised to discover a major biopic starring Heath Ledger, which I promptly added to our NetFlix queue and almost as promptly forgot about. Now that we're at least working our way through this again, it came up. Unfortunately, the film is not based on Carey's Ned Kelly novel but on Robert Drewe's (Our Sunshine, 2003). Maybe that's unfair--not having read it, I can't say for sure it's an inferior work, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't entirely director Gregor Jordan's idea to insert a bodice-ripping romance between Kelly and an English gentlewoman. Thankfully, although that was pivotal to the plot, it didn't dominate it.
Overall, I was less impressed by the lead actors than I was by the secondary cast. The best you can say about Orlando Bloom is that he doesn't screw up any of the scenes he's in. Geoffrey Rush phones it in and Ledger appears to be so intimidated by the legendary stature of Kelly in Australian history, folklore, and national identity that he it ends up making him wooden. I was more moved by Joel Edgerton's conflicted role as a police informer; the death scene of Ned's younger brother Dan (portrayed by Dublin-born Laurence Kinlan) had me in tears. Naomi Watts hardly registered as the gentlewoman, but Kris McQuade as Kelly's mother--Oh. My God. Just looking into her eyes reveals the suffering of four centuries of English subjugation and if her voice was any more gravelly you could pave a road with it.
[Linguistic note: As the name suggests, the Kellys are an Irish family, but Ledger never quite nails the accent. You can tell throughout that he's someone whose native speech is non-rhotic trying to put the r's in. This might've worked given that Kelly was actually a native of Victoria, but it doesn't make sense for the older of two brothers to sound more assimilated (though, of course, you could say the fault is really Kinlan's for not trying to sound more Aussie). After making himself indistiguishable from a native-born Wyomingan in Brokeback Mountain, I had higher hopes.]
It's a competent retelling of Kelly's exploits, though I don't think it paints as powerful a picture of the toll exacted by being born into an oppressive society where you will be end up being treated as a criminal no matter what you do as Carey's novel. The role of the Black trackers is predictably minimised; I don't recall seeing any at all during the Siege of Glenrowan. The bloodthirstiness of the police forces there is also a bit exaggerated; only two hostages died in the shooting, but the movie makes it look like at least a dozen. (Of course, if anything, the film makes the attack look more organised than the "fearfully bungled" operation described by eyewitnesses.)