Black lives don’t matter in Warwick Thornton’s fiercely original outback western, a surprisingly emotional genre piece that simmers with menace and doesn’t let up until the bloody finale. Saturated in the heatwave colors of Australia’s scorching Red Center, with its searing blue skies and bright orange sands, Wolfram makes the grim, lawless backwater of Wake in Fright seem positively cosmopolitan by comparison.
The title is another word for tungsten, which in 1930s Australia is more valuable than gold, and in scenes reminiscent of There Will Be Blood we see pioneer Billy (Matt Nable) in the process of mining it with the help of two young children, Max and Kid. Billy is a tough taskmaster, sending Max down a hole in the ground to chisel out the precious metal, a tall task for a minor. When Max comes up almost empty handed, Billy loses his temper (“What the f*ck have you been doing down there?”) and breaks out the dynamite, a portent of the film’s explosive capacity to erupt into violence.
At this point two enigmatic strangers ride into the nearby town — Casey (Erroll Shand) and Frank (Joe Bird) — bringing with them a palpable sense of dread. For some reason, there’s a horse carcass in the town square, and Casey is curious. “What’s with the dead horse?” he asks, but no reply is forthcoming. For a time, it seems that the entire film might be a non-sequitur, as Thornton cuts up the narrative into seemingly unrelated sequences, killing off Billy with a snake bite and introducing an indigenous woman, Pansy (Deborah Mailman), and her Chinese partner Zhang (Jason Chong).
The mystery deepens when the strangers turn up the ranch owned by the hermetic Kennedy (Thomas M. Wright), who lives alone with his mixed-race son Philomac (Pedrea Jackson). In accordance with the film’s main theme of toxic white colonialism, Kennedy treats Philomac with contempt but shows a weird fealty to Casey. “He’s family,” says Kennedy, with no further elaboration. Small wonder that Philomac is seething with resentment and almost leaves his father to die when he starts choking on a slice of watermelon.
All these stories start to synch up when Casey and Frank take Max with them, not knowing that Kid is in hot pursuit of their sibling with a donkey. It transpires that in a world where all theft is property (stealing immediately grants ownership), Max and Kid were abducted by Billy, who took them from their mother Pansy, who is torn up with guilt while making her way to a new life in Queensland with Zhang. Finally, Philomac snaps under the pressure, and escapes from his father taking Kid and Max with him.
Given their hatred of indigenous people, Casey and Frank set out to bring them back, a vengeance mission with echoes of The Searchers. They are further enraged, then, when the three boys are taken in by a pair of Chinese pioneers who put them to work but at least give them food and shelter. It’s likely a coincidence but the character of Shi (Ferdinand Huang), who casually breaks out the kung fu when his life is in peril, highlights the existence of Asian explorers in this period of history, something largely ignored in the US but embraced in spaghetti westerns such as 1973’s Shanghai Joe.
In that respect, Wolfram is a masterful merger of merger of serious social comment and taut, thrilling action, a film where base human cruelty is always somewhere on the horizon, a film that simply reeks of death and decay (there are more flies than Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia). This, however, being the director of the very definitely humanist Samson and Delilah, Wolfram gives the last word to the underdogs in the story, ending with an ingenious twist that upturns everything we’ve seen so far and pays off the film’s sometimes frustrating opacity big-time. Arthouse audiences everywhere will appreciate the film’s scope and Thornton’s controlled execution (a special mention for writers Steven McGregor and David Tranter). Australian cinema, meanwhile, may just have found itself a new modern classic.
Title: Wolfram
Festival: Berlin (Competition)
Director: Warwick Thornton
Screenwriters: Steven McGregor, David Tranter
Cast: Deborah Mailman, Erroll Shand, Joe Bird, Thomas M Wright, Ferdinand Hoang
Sales: Paradise City Sales
Running time: 1 hr 42 mins
English (US) ·