Everyone please give a warm welcome to our new contributor, Mike D'Angelo!
The first thing to know about Nitram, assuming that you don’t want to replicate the abrupt, mortifying “Oh, duh” moment that I experienced about 12 minutes in, is that the film’s title is Martin spelled backwards. (This only registered when people kept pronouncing it like the words “nit” and ram” joined together, with equal emphasis on both syllables, rather than like a cousin of Bertram.) The second thing to know about Nitram is that the movie treats that first thing as if it were Bruce Willis’ corporeal status in The Sixth Sense, except with heightened security and no big reveal. Eventually, the protagonist mentions that he doesn’t like being called Nitram, but we still haven’t heard and will never expressly be told his actual name; Shaun Grant’s screenplay makes a heavy-handed and/or legally indemnifying point of never once having anybody—not even the guy’s parents, with whom he still lives at the outset—address him or refer to him as Martin. It takes a while for this to start seeming weird, and the conceit, if that’s what you’d call it, likely lands quite differently with Australian viewers, who’d immediately recognize which real-life Martin Nitram is about. By the end, though, it seems typical of this film’s futile effort to explain the intrinsically inexplicable.
“Why did they do it?” we long to know about mass shooters, uneasy with the idea that their horrific actions are often impossible to anticipate. Movies that try to answer that question inevitably fail, and Gus Van Sant’s prize-winning, Columbine-inspired Elephant arguably succeeds in part by implicitly mocking the media’s laundry list of ostensible culprits: violent video games, a culture of casual bullying, etc. (I wouldn’t make that argument, but others have.) Nitram boasts a gun-control message that’s underlined in closing text about the failures of Australia’s buyback program—which was a direct response to the carnage this film builds to—but it’s mostly just an in-depth portrait of Martin Bryant, who in 1996 murdered 35 people at and around the Port Arthur historical site in Tasmania. Caleb Landry Jones won Best Actor at Cannes last year for his performance in the title role; as usual, he delivers expert twitchiness, making Nitram (as even the film’s end credits call him; I’ll follow suit) vulnerable and volatile in equal measure, unmistakably a human grenade whose pin may dislodge at any moment. But Nitram’s two hours provide no particular insight into Bryant’s actions, except insofar as they echo reports that he was developmentally disabled to some degree. The film “works” only to the extent that you wonder how such a clearly unstable individual could purchase an arsenal with zero difficulty, and that’s a problem with which most of us (especially in America) are pretty damn familiar by now.
Director Justin Kurzel’s entire career, it should be noted, exhibits a morbid fascination with violence. His feature debut, Snowtown (“helpfully” retitled The Snowtown Murders for U.S. release, and likewise written by Shaun Grant), recounts the story of Australia’s most notorious serial killers, primarily from their perspective. He’s also made a biopic of famed outlaw Ned Kelly, an adaptation of Assassin’s Creed, and the second-most-recent notable screen version of Shakespeare’s second-bloodiest play, Macbeth. (Wondering which one’s bloodiest? Watch Julie Taymor’s Titus.) To Kurzel’s credit, he keeps all of the shooting offscreen here, avoiding any sense of exploitation; viewers unfamiliar with Bryant could easily make it deep into the film without realizing that they’re watching a journey toward mass murder. Still, it’s unclear what we gain from imagining the inner lives of those who commit atrocities. That approach can work in pure fiction—a film like, say, Taxi Driver can just invent whatever cocktail of inflammatory neuroses will best facilitate its exploration of a particular mindset—but tackling a real-life murderer with any fidelity to what actually happened will generally result in reductive, superficial stabs at connecting far-flung dots.
You can see that very clearly in Nitram’s treatment of the people around Nitram. Bryant’s father struggled with depression and wound up committing suicide; the film feels obligated to address this, especially given that Bryant’s first victims were connected to his dad’s failed business venture—while Bryant killed everyone else at random, those initial murders were pure revenge—but it does so in unsatisfying dramatic shorthand, rushing through Dad’s emotional arc (despite Anthony LaPaglia’s impressive embodiment of exhausted defeat) across a handful of brief scenes. Indeed, the suicide itself gets handled so obliquely that what happened may not be entirely clear to those who don’t know the background. The great Judy Davis does superbly caustic work as Nitram’s protective yet dismissive mother, but isn’t given enough room to develop a fully three-dimensional character who’d justify the film’s final shot, which strongly and rather unfairly suggests that Mom deserves a lot of the blame for her son’s actions. Most frustrating of all is Nitram’s necessarily short-lived stint with Helen, a wealthy eccentric who hires Nitram to walk her many dogs and soon invites him to live with her. (Kurzel very sensibly hired his wife, who happens to be The Badadook star Essie Davis, for this choice supporting role.) Their undefined relationship—Davis makes a five-course meal of Mom interrogating Helen about whether Nitram’s a substitute husband or substitute son—is far and away the film’s strongest aspect, with an outback Sunset Boulevard vibe, but the need to stick to what happened in real life prevents it from achieving any real force.
Ultimately, Nitram just doesn’t demonstrate any particularly good reason to exist, apart from providing a showcase for several terrific actors. (Despite his Cannes prize, Jones gives arguably the least remarkable performance, letting his long, unruly hair do much of the quasi-feral work by keeping it forever half-shrouding his face.) Like Elephant, the film tosses out a bunch of possible reasons for the nightmare that inspired it—the killer was “slow” (as Nitram says he overheard himself described as a child); his parents screwed up; he was bullied or ignored by other kids; he was overmedicated; he was undermedicated; he was spurred to kill by coverage of the 1996 Dunblane school shooting (in Scotland); he was enabled by insufficiently strict gun laws—and ends up coming across like a pointless hodgepodge of maybes that only serves to trivialize real-world suffering and inadvertently ennoble its perpetrator. A few years ago, Keith Maitland’s regrettably little-seen Tower boldly depicted Charles Whitman’s 1966 shooting spree at the University of Texas at Austin without ever so much as mentioning Whitman’s name, much less attempting to explain or understand him. (And he’s among the most potentially sympathetic of mass murderers, too, with evidence suggesting that an undiagnosed brain tumor may have set him off.) After that deeply moving innovation, this film feels like regression.
One of the first notable online film critics, having launched his site The Man Who Viewed Too Much in 1995, Mike D’Angelo has also written professionally for Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, Esquire, Las Vegas Weekly, and The A.V. Club, among other publications. He’s been a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and currently blathers opinions almost daily on Patreon.
The first thing to know about Nitram, assuming that you don’t want to replicate the abrupt, mortifying “Oh, duh” moment that I experienced about 12 minutes in, is that the film’s title is Martin spelled backwards. (This only registered when people kept pronouncing it like the words “nit” and ram” joined together, with equal emphasis on both syllables, rather than like a cousin of Bertram.) The second thing to know about Nitram is that the movie treats that first thing as if it were Bruce Willis’ corporeal status in The Sixth Sense, except with heightened security and no big reveal. Eventually, the protagonist mentions that he doesn’t like being called Nitram, but we still haven’t heard and will never expressly be told his actual name; Shaun Grant’s screenplay makes a heavy-handed and/or legally indemnifying point of never once having anybody—not even the guy’s parents, with whom he still lives at the outset—address him or refer to him as Martin. It takes a while for this to start seeming weird, and the conceit, if that’s what you’d call it, likely lands quite differently with Australian viewers, who’d immediately recognize which real-life Martin Nitram is about. By the end, though, it seems typical of this film’s futile effort to explain the intrinsically inexplicable.
“Why did they do it?” we long to know about mass shooters, uneasy with the idea that their horrific actions are often impossible to anticipate. Movies that try to answer that question inevitably fail, and Gus Van Sant’s prize-winning, Columbine-inspired Elephant arguably succeeds in part by implicitly mocking the media’s laundry list of ostensible culprits: violent video games, a culture of casual bullying, etc. (I wouldn’t make that argument, but others have.) Nitram boasts a gun-control message that’s underlined in closing text about the failures of Australia’s buyback program—which was a direct response to the carnage this film builds to—but it’s mostly just an in-depth portrait of Martin Bryant, who in 1996 murdered 35 people at and around the Port Arthur historical site in Tasmania. Caleb Landry Jones won Best Actor at Cannes last year for his performance in the title role; as usual, he delivers expert twitchiness, making Nitram (as even the film’s end credits call him; I’ll follow suit) vulnerable and volatile in equal measure, unmistakably a human grenade whose pin may dislodge at any moment. But Nitram’s two hours provide no particular insight into Bryant’s actions, except insofar as they echo reports that he was developmentally disabled to some degree. The film “works” only to the extent that you wonder how such a clearly unstable individual could purchase an arsenal with zero difficulty, and that’s a problem with which most of us (especially in America) are pretty damn familiar by now.
Director Justin Kurzel’s entire career, it should be noted, exhibits a morbid fascination with violence. His feature debut, Snowtown (“helpfully” retitled The Snowtown Murders for U.S. release, and likewise written by Shaun Grant), recounts the story of Australia’s most notorious serial killers, primarily from their perspective. He’s also made a biopic of famed outlaw Ned Kelly, an adaptation of Assassin’s Creed, and the second-most-recent notable screen version of Shakespeare’s second-bloodiest play, Macbeth. (Wondering which one’s bloodiest? Watch Julie Taymor’s Titus.) To Kurzel’s credit, he keeps all of the shooting offscreen here, avoiding any sense of exploitation; viewers unfamiliar with Bryant could easily make it deep into the film without realizing that they’re watching a journey toward mass murder. Still, it’s unclear what we gain from imagining the inner lives of those who commit atrocities. That approach can work in pure fiction—a film like, say, Taxi Driver can just invent whatever cocktail of inflammatory neuroses will best facilitate its exploration of a particular mindset—but tackling a real-life murderer with any fidelity to what actually happened will generally result in reductive, superficial stabs at connecting far-flung dots.
You can see that very clearly in Nitram’s treatment of the people around Nitram. Bryant’s father struggled with depression and wound up committing suicide; the film feels obligated to address this, especially given that Bryant’s first victims were connected to his dad’s failed business venture—while Bryant killed everyone else at random, those initial murders were pure revenge—but it does so in unsatisfying dramatic shorthand, rushing through Dad’s emotional arc (despite Anthony LaPaglia’s impressive embodiment of exhausted defeat) across a handful of brief scenes. Indeed, the suicide itself gets handled so obliquely that what happened may not be entirely clear to those who don’t know the background. The great Judy Davis does superbly caustic work as Nitram’s protective yet dismissive mother, but isn’t given enough room to develop a fully three-dimensional character who’d justify the film’s final shot, which strongly and rather unfairly suggests that Mom deserves a lot of the blame for her son’s actions. Most frustrating of all is Nitram’s necessarily short-lived stint with Helen, a wealthy eccentric who hires Nitram to walk her many dogs and soon invites him to live with her. (Kurzel very sensibly hired his wife, who happens to be The Badadook star Essie Davis, for this choice supporting role.) Their undefined relationship—Davis makes a five-course meal of Mom interrogating Helen about whether Nitram’s a substitute husband or substitute son—is far and away the film’s strongest aspect, with an outback Sunset Boulevard vibe, but the need to stick to what happened in real life prevents it from achieving any real force.
Ultimately, Nitram just doesn’t demonstrate any particularly good reason to exist, apart from providing a showcase for several terrific actors. (Despite his Cannes prize, Jones gives arguably the least remarkable performance, letting his long, unruly hair do much of the quasi-feral work by keeping it forever half-shrouding his face.) Like Elephant, the film tosses out a bunch of possible reasons for the nightmare that inspired it—the killer was “slow” (as Nitram says he overheard himself described as a child); his parents screwed up; he was bullied or ignored by other kids; he was overmedicated; he was undermedicated; he was spurred to kill by coverage of the 1996 Dunblane school shooting (in Scotland); he was enabled by insufficiently strict gun laws—and ends up coming across like a pointless hodgepodge of maybes that only serves to trivialize real-world suffering and inadvertently ennoble its perpetrator. A few years ago, Keith Maitland’s regrettably little-seen Tower boldly depicted Charles Whitman’s 1966 shooting spree at the University of Texas at Austin without ever so much as mentioning Whitman’s name, much less attempting to explain or understand him. (And he’s among the most potentially sympathetic of mass murderers, too, with evidence suggesting that an undiagnosed brain tumor may have set him off.) After that deeply moving innovation, this film feels like regression.
One of the first notable online film critics, having launched his site The Man Who Viewed Too Much in 1995, Mike D’Angelo has also written professionally for Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, Esquire, Las Vegas Weekly, and The A.V. Club, among other publications. He’s been a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and currently blathers opinions almost daily on Patreon.
Categories: oz/kiwi cinema
