Usually a director’s cut makes the film longer. Not this time. When Warwick Thornton’s new movie premiered at Cannes last year it ran at 116 minutes. Now, in time for its UK release, Thornton has reduced it to just over an hour and a half, removing a substantial 20 minutes. The effect is to sharpen focus and tighten up the final act – which is where I felt it sagged the first time around – and create a greater emphasis on the narrative give-and-take between Cate Blanchett’s antiheroine and the Indigenous Australian boy that she comes to care for. Yet for me there is still something a bit soft-edged about the drama, which doesn’t punch as hard as Thornton’s other films. And there’s a touch of camp – not un-enjoyable, of course – in Blanchett’s performance.
Blanchett plays the imperious, fully wimpled nun Sister Eileen, who using tricks and wiles has imposed absolute bureaucratic authority over a Catholic orphanage in the 1940s Australian outback – a remote, hot, dusty place where the callous state authorities dump runaways, particularly Indigenous children. She attaches great importance to christening her charges, effacing their Indigenous identity and imposing Christian ideology.
Yet when a new Indigenous boy, played by Aswan Reid, arrives, something in his manner and appearance captures her attention much more than the others. He seems to have strange powers and a special emotional connection with the carved-wood statue of the crucified Christ which Sister Eileen has put up in the church: he starts bleeding from his palms. Is he the Christ child? Or a mirage served up from the baking landscape and embedding itself in the addled colonialist mindset?
It’s watchable, and Blanchett fans will want to see it – but for me this doesn’t have the weight and force of Thornton’s other films.