Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Leah Purcell
Starring: Leah Purcell, Rob Collins, Sam Reid, Jessica De
Gouw
To say multi-hyphenate artist Leah Purcell is obsessed with
Australian author Henry Lawson's 1892 short story 'The Drover's
Wife' is something of an understatement. The arrival of her directorial
debut, The Drover's Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson, marks Purcell's third time adapting Lawson's story, first as a play,
then as a novel. The original story is a simple folk tale of a drover's
wife who fends off a snake from attacking her children while her husband
is away driving livestock to market. In Purcell's multimedia expansions
it becomes a tale of domestic abuse and racial identity.
In the film, Purcell casts herself in the title role of Molly Johnson,
who finds herself facing down a bullock, which she promptly shoots and
turns into a splendid roast for her children while her husband is away
on a cattle drive. But before she pulls the trigger, something causes
her to halt, illustrated by a flashback to another incident that saw
Johnson forced to wield a shotgun.
You won’t need to be a genius to quickly figure out what's going on
here, but Purcell persists with playing it as a mystery, occasionally
cutting back to that flashback in a manner meant to tease but which just
makes us shrug. It's so blatantly obvious what Johnson did to make her
feel so haunted by her actions that you'll be scratching your head as to
why Purcell doesn't just lay this information out from the off. Had she
done so, it would have added an extra layer of suspense to a clunky
narrative that badly needs it.
Just after Johnson has sent her kids off to the local missionary while
she awaits the birth of her latest sprog, a fugitive aborigine, Yadaka
(Rob Collins), arrives at her farm, bound in chains. It's at this
moment that her water breaks, and though Yadaka helps her with her
labour, the child is stillborn. Johnson allows Yadaka to hide out on her
farm for a couple of days until the next full moon, whose light he plans
to use as a guide across the treacherous outback.
It's ironic that just at the point where Johnson breaks Yadaka's
chains, Purcell's film becomes shackled by its literary and stage roots.
The storytelling is overly reliant on dialogue, with plot revelations
dished out through speeches in the manner of a daytime soap opera. As
Johnson and Yadaka, Purcell and Collins are captivating, but they're
hamstrung by a script that struggles to make its points regarding gender
and identity without resorting to speechifying. Both the attitudes of
characters and their dialogue come off as anachronistic - when asked
what crime he's accused of, Yadaka replies "Existing while black," while
a supporting character of a policeman's proto-suffragette wife, Louisa
(Jessica De Gouw), exists solely to hammer home the film's
feminist themes.
Thanks to a combination of Australia's natural landscape and the
cinematography of Mark Wareham,
The Drover's Wife is very easy on the eye. But Purcell
can't translate her film's visual splendour into visual storytelling,
and in her directorial debut she struggles with the two key fundamentals
of narrative filmmaking – the establishment and communication of time
and space. The geography of the area is particularly confusing, as early
on we're told the nearest town is but a few hours ride from Johnson's
farm, yet later, when the town's newly assigned sheriff (Sam Reid) attempts to ride out to warn Johnson of Yadaka's escape, he finds it
an oddly formidable journey despite Johnson's son having literally just
walked home from town! Similarly, it's difficult to figure out just what
length of time the film is playing out over – it seems only a couple of
days have passed on Johnson's farm, yet in town, Louisa has already
managed to get herself settled in and knock out a pamphlet on women's
rights.
Based on Purcell's performance in the title role, I imagine her stage
production might have had quite the impact. But in translating her
take on Lawson's story to screen, she seems to have bitten off more
than she can chew. With a more experienced cinematic hand at the
wheel, The Drover's Wife
might have been the latest in a growing line of impressive Aussie
westerns, but so crude and clunky is the storytelling here that it
never feels like anything more than a modern manifesto in period
drag.
