True History of the Kelly Gang True History of the Kelly Gang

The story of Australian bush-ranger Ned Kelly and his gang as they flee from authorities during the 1870s.

Based on Peter Carey's Booker Prize winning novel and starring George MacKay, Nicholas Hoult, Essie David, Thomasin McKenzie, Charlie Hunnam & Russell Crowe, Justin Kurzel's exhilarating new film True History of The Kelly Gang explores the story behind the legendary historical figure Ned Kelly.

Based on Peter Carey's novel.



Ned Kelly gang storms screen in queer adaptation of Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang

History, gender and steel mouldboards are all enthusiastically bent in Australian director Justin Kurzel's blustering, scattershot adaptation of Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel True History of the Kelly Gang, which tracks the life of the nation's most mythologised outlaw from youth to the noose.

A near-incoherent ensemble piece that squanders an enviable cast - which is studded with hip rising stars like lanky Brit Nicholas Hoult (The Favourite), Thomasin McKenzie (Jojo Rabbit), and Kiwi country singer Marlon Williams (A Star is Born) - it's the latest in a long line of films to take aim at Ned Kelly, only to glance off his armour, barely leaving a mark.

(Fun fact: cinematic representations of the legendary bushranger date back to just about the birth of the medium, with the 1906 release of Charles Tait's The Story of the Kelly Gang, now recognised as the first-ever feature-length film.)

Given that True History had the benefit of strong, subversive literary source material, and a production team to match, it's both a surprise and a shame that it plays as an overwrought student theatre production, replete with pointlessly minimalist sets and an overabundance of strobing effects.

The film finds Kurzel back on home turf after a couple of fumbled attempts at the bigtime (2015's Macbeth and 2016's Assassin's Creed) and reunited with screenwriter Shaun Grant, with whom he forged his first feature: the chilling thriller Snowtown (2011), based on the string of murders orchestrated by John Bunting in and around Adelaide in the 90s.

In the pair's latest offering, as in Snowtown, a grisly true-crime tale serves as fodder for an exploration of Australian masculinity; both films are designed to probe the intersection of violence and queer desire.

What exists primarily as a thrumming undercurrent in Kurzel's debut, however, has risen to the surface in True History: here, Kelly and his gang are treated to a glam-punk makeover, and acts of violence, as well as camaraderie, are laden with eroticism.

(Is the idea that two 'manly' men might secretly want to kiss really the ultimate taboo, though?)

Babadook star Essie Davis (who is married to Kurzel) is tasked with playing the crafty and indomitable Kelly matriarch, Ellen; Russell Crowe plays Harry Power, the ageing bushranger who takes the young Ned as his apprentice - against the boy's will.

Meanwhile, Kelly's iconic steel get-up - a mantle previously assumed by the likes of Heath Ledger and Mick Jagger - is donned by British up-and-comer George MacKay (who also has a leading role in Sam Mendes' war drama 1917, opening this week).
Instead of the classic beard, MacKay's Kelly sports a strawberry blonde mullet (as does young Ned, played by Orlando Schwerdt) - a hipster hairdo that holds more subcultural capital amongst today's youth.

In another, more significant departure from orthodoxy, Kelly also spends a good deal of the film's latter section wearing a dress of black floral lace. His loyal followers (Sean Keenan, Louis Hewison, and Earl Cave, looking every inch the son of his rocker father Nick) are similarly attired: a soiled, frilly gown hanging off each slender, boyish frame.

It's a costuming decision that takes its cue from a quirk of Carey's novel, in which members of the Kelly gang align themselves with an anti-authoritarian movement called the Sons of Sieve, whose members don dresses and blacken their faces before undertaking any official business.

The Sons of Sieve are a Carey invention with some basis in history, indebted to the tradition of ritual cross-dressing as protest that was practised by secret societies of peasantry in Ireland throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.
But this socio-historical significance gets rather lost in the film: exposition is painfully thin on the ground, and much of the dialogue is cursory - or mumbled, or shouted.

What remains is the spectacle of this ragtag band of rebels - distinctly 21st-century tattoos poking out above the bustlines of their dresses, silver rings stacked on Cave's fingers (as Dan Kelly), an eyepatch slapped on Hewison (as Steve Hart) - cavorting and fighting and posturing, looking for all the world like a buck's night gone to seed, or the warm-up act at a Kirin J. Callinan concert.

Watching these scenes, I saw a performance of transgression by straight, would-be punk dudes playing dress-ups; a testosterone-fuelled co-opting of a queer aesthetic, and to some extent a queer sexual identity.

The cross-dressing feels like a calculated Baz Lurhmann-esque gesture - a form of eye-catching anachronism meant to justify making yet another film about Kelly - while also pandering to the millennial set, deeply suspicious of the tales that prop up the national mythology.

High on its own supply of punk spirit, True History of the Kelly Gang is undone by a surfeit of style and a dearth of political substance.

I wager that Kurzel's take on Carey's novel can be summed up in the words of the fictionalised Kelly himself: furiously scribbling his memoir while holed up in the Glenrowan Inn, the end increasingly nigh, he lets one of his hostages, schoolteacher Thomas Curnow, read a page. "There is fault with the parsing," Kelly warns him. Begob, is he right.

The Age Digital Edition: Was Ned really a rogue with a brogue?

When we imagine Ned Kelly's accent, we think of a bloke with a strong Irish brogue - addressing his gang like the leader of a revolution.

But hang on, wasn't Ned Kelly born in Australia? Yes, his birthplace was the small town of Beveridge, 50 kilometres north of Melbourne. So perhaps we should be thinking of a country drawl, or a bogan twang.

It's a hot topic among Kelly fanatics, and is set to fire up with the release of the latest film inspired by the famous bushranger. George MacKay - a Brit (with an Australian father) who stars in True History of the Kelly Gang - portrays Ned with a mainstream Australian accent.

It won't please Keith Warren, an education officer in the Beechworth historic precinct who helps re-enact scenes from Kelly's life every day.

He reckons Ned had " a very strong Irish accent' ' and that to give him an Aussie accent would be " historically ridiculous'' .

" His dad was from Tipperary and his mum was from County Antrim. They wouldn't have got rid of the Irish in the family. He was very Irish. The Irish brogue they used to call it. Apples don't fall far from the tree.''

But Dr Bruce Moore, visiting fellow at the Australian National University school of literature, languages and linguistics, says Kelly probably had an Australian accent. Dr Moore, author of Speaking Our Language: The Story of Australian English, doubts there was enough of an ethnic enclave where Kelly grew up and went to public school in the 1860s for Kelly to maintain his parents' accents.

The pull to fit in with schoolfriends would have been too strong, he says. " It's much more likely he spoke in the kind of accent his peer group was speaking. Which would have been the Australian accent. Which had been established in the colonies, I've argued, by about 1830.''

Matt Shore, Kelly enthusiast and founder of the Ned Kelly Vault museum in Beechworth, says many actors playing Kelly, including Heath Ledger in 2003 and even Mick Jagger in 1970, favoured an Irish-accented Ned.

Mr Shore, however, believes the real Kelly had an Australian accent, but perhaps with Irish tinges. " I can't see how a young boy being raised in a very large Irish family wouldn't have picked up some of the Irish lilt. But I just don't think he would have had the thick Irish accent that's portrayed in some films .''

Mr Shore says " almost every aspect' ' of Kelly's life is " rehashed or re-examined' ' and the new film " will create an enormous amount of interest in the Kelly story, worldwide, as did the Peter Carey book that it's based on'' .

True History of the Kelly Gang is in cinemas from January 9 and on Stan from January 26.

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❊ Web Links ❊

➼ True History of the Kelly Gang 

➼ Movie Poster

❊ Also See... ❊

➼ The Story of the Kelly Gang






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