Portrait of a murderer
Article reserved for subscribers
Crazy and clumsy, Justin Kurzel’s film, which looks back on a mass killing in Australia, feels sorry for its protagonist-assassin, who is also brilliantly played by Caleb Landry Jones.
Let’s get the mammoth off the table straight away: yes, Caleb Landry Jones is fantastic in the main role, the interpretation prize at Cannes last year was not stolen. But that’s another subject. The question today is Nitram. The film. The thing. The train wreck. Who looks back on the events that led at the Port Arthur Massacre in Tasmania in the mid-1990s through an intimate portrait of the assassin, Martin Bryant. So diluted, romanticized, arranged for flute that it would have been more honest to make it a pure fiction – it might have allowed the director, Justin Kurzel, to shoot on the scene of the drama, from where he was fired kicked in the ass while reading the script.
It must be said that Shaun Grant, its author, only kept in Bryant’s career what suited him, removing key elements of the story to present his character in the guise of a wild flower whose society does not did not want to and who saw her only friend die before her eyes – a marginal millionaire living alone with her spleen and her twelve dogs, whose inheritance will indirectly finance the slaughter. The angle is legitimate: we avoid the…