STORM BOY: A Flash From The Past

In her 1980 film essay “Nationalism in Australian Cinema”, Anne B Hutton argued that in the early years of the Australian film industry, two major genre trends emerged: ocker comedies and period films. Written in the midst of the “Australian New Wave”, the resurgence of Australian cinema that begun in the 1970’s and faded midway through the next decade, Hutton noticed that these two genres were having a quiet comeback with titles like Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, My Brilliant Career and Newsfront.

She found that the industry had pivoted into a safe territory where the lack of ethnic and social minorities presented on-screen could be camouflaged under the guise of classic nationalism, nostalgic of a time in Australia where the population was primitively viewed as a collective of white, working-class citizens who prided themselves in their unchecked masculinity.
Not only did this nostalgia provide a comfortable aesthetic for the adults in attendance, one which could mask the lack of incident usually found within these narratives, but allow stories to bet set within the outback, an economically driven response to the increasing influence of American ideals in metropolitan Australia – we can never match their budgets, but our locations are truly one of a kind.

A Nostalgic Audience

It’s this mindset where Shawn Seet’s grand re-adaptation of Storm Boy, the Colin Thiel scribed children’s novel that is the cornerstone for most Australian school educations, starts to make sense. Scoring a lucrative school holiday release, this live-action, leisurely-paced examination of nostalgia that is itself nostalgic is tightly squeezed between some titanic animated tent-poles – Wreck it Ralph 2, How to Train Your Dragon 3 and Spider-Verse just to name a few – so it’s puzzling as to who the actual audience for this film is for.

One can imagine that the original pitch meeting featured a mountain of paraphernalia regarding the success of Kriv Stender’s Red Dog or the similarly family-friendly animal adventure Oddball, but most children nowadays simply lack the attention span that this film requires. The quiet seeding of care and melancholic sentimentality necessary for the movie’s key emotional payoffs to work clashes with the modern hyperactivity that most kids are adjusted to now. Alongside them, the adults who wish to watch this and reminisce about their own experiences with Storm Boy – the 1976 film, the book and their own youthful experiences – will find Seet’s sanitised take on the adventures of a boy and his faithful pelican far too juvenile to rise above their personal feelings of the original material.

Two of the biggest successes of last year, Breathe and Ladies in Black, both provided rose-coloured glances back into Australia’s past, each equally sterilised of any real trauma or complication (which explains the general population’s ignorance of Warwick Thornton’s terrific but confronting Sweet Country). They represent a cinematic sedative for a generation who have seemingly grown uncomfortable with the recent strong push towards a pop culture presence of different racial, sexual and socio-political minorities that’s more accurately representative of today’s Australian population.

Not only do films like Storm Boy provide nostalgia through its imagery – the film opens with a drone shot capturing a vast untouched beach, a quiet spot where one could’ve spent a childhood happily living in a single shack back in the day – but they provide nostalgic themes, such as learning to reflect on our past experiences, the loss of innocence and the eternal yearning of a wasted childhood. These are all subject matters which bolster a basic coming of age tale that has become a part of the collective Australian experience, partially because of its inclusion within generations of primary education, but also because it’s a perfect time capsule of a distinctive time in Australia’s past, one free of commercialism, politics, and if this 2019 reworking is anything to go by, racism.

A Little Bit of Rush

Speaking of avoiding unpleasant topics, it’s fitting that Storm Boy opens with that of a disheveled Geoffrey Rush being driven in the back of a black SUV as he’s rushed into the offices of his mining corporation, being forced through a pack of angry protesters – it’s almost documentary-like in its reflection of Rush’s current social status (which was shot back in 2017).

Equally reflective of his present-day conditions is his character, Mike Kingsley’s, fractured state of mind. On the cusp of a lucrative mining deal, one worked out by his suit-and-tie son Malcolm (Erik Thomson), Kingsley seems distant, distracted, barely feigning interest in the crises that surround him. In the high-rise boardroom where he is to seal the big deal, he wistfully gazes outside of the window as a heavy storm of thunder and rain rages on, with the rain droplets streaking across the glass, creating the image of bars of a jail cell, triggering Kingsley to begin his descent into a state of regretful nostalgia.

Thanks to the spurring of his stubborn granddaughter, a melodramatic figure who actively protests the destruction of deregistered land played by Morgana Davies, Kingsley longingly reflects on how one magical summer, thanks to the help of his stoic father “Hideaway” Tom (a serviceable Jai Courtney) and an estranged Aboriginal man Fingerbone Bill (Trevor Jamieson), he rescued and raised a trio of orphaned pelicans.

Part of the book’s continued longevity within the classrooms of every Australian student has been it’s easily dissectable nature. The three rescued pelicans, affectionately named Mr. Proud, Mr. Ponder and Mr. Percival by the precocious young Kingsley, then dubbed ‘Storm Boy’ (Finn Little), represent the different stages of Kingsley’s transition from a wholesome childhood into the more challenging realm of adulthood, one majorly signified by the fate of his favourite pet, the “weakest of the bunch”, Mr. Percival.

Outside of updating the novel’s original themes of environmentalism to tackle today’s prominent problems – mega-mining and pastoral developments within indigenous lands – Rush’s nostalgic framing device is largely useless, often interrupting the flow of the main story to merely reiterate what we’ve seen, and removing the timeless quality of the narrative.

Part of the appeal of the traditional coming-of-age story is witnessing the main character develop an identity, assuring themselves of who they are as they enter the tricky territory of adulthood, leaving the audience on an ambiguous note of hope; that despite whoever or whatever they grow up to become after the events of the movie, we are left with an appropriate level of ambivalence that makes us reflect on our own personal paths that got us to where we are today.

Giving a finality to the fate of Storm Boy, a frazzled businessman who fights against the environmentalism he once believed in, gives an unsatisfying totality to his character, giving a literal answer to a question that was never asked. David Gulpilil (who is given a clever cameo in this film) sums up this need for ambiguity perfectly in the final lines of the original 1976 adaptation, as he gazes upon Mr. Percival’s squealing pelican chicks: “Perhaps Mr. Percival is starting all over again”.

The Men Behind the Men

This blunt approach to the material is unsurprising coming from Shaun Seet, a (mainly) television director who has helmed several of the banal “Australian celebrity” TV biopics which have become the rage lately, with the atrocious Olivia Newton-John two-parter being his biggest claim-to-fame. These are projects which require a painful level of digestible didacticism in order to fit decades worth of artistic achievements into two bite-sized packages that can be shown in the family-friendly hours of free-to-air television.

He’s paired with another television-cohort, Justin Monjo, whose script seems to sand off any coarseness evident in the 1976 version – gone is the sense of looming inevitability of change, harshly signified by the presence of guns and drunk-driving hunters in the original (representative of the unavoidable invasion of industrialism and the inescapable change coming for Storm Boy). The simmering racial antagonism between Hideaway Tom and Fingerbone is completely absent too, as the latter merely exists as a figure of mysticism, that despite the efforts to incorporate more Indigenous elements into both the aesthetics and the swelling score, is still severely underused by the watered-down script.

Removing the unconventional friendship between Tom and Fingerbone undercuts any form of noticeable change in either character, especially because Tom’s arc formerly centred around his caution for the outside world being challenged by the considerate nature of Fingerbone. Tom’s decision to raise his son in isolation is never questioned either, an unconventional parenting technique which was handled with a greater level of intelligence in Debra Granik‘s Leave No Trace last year.

This time, the two father figures, as well as the grown-up Kingsley, are purely defined by their relationships with dead women. Those sick of the trope of dead female characters existing purely to help define their male counterparts will be quickly frustrated, as this trio of heartbroken men pine for lost loves – the biggest female character is that of the granddaughter, who is basically an earpiece for the rambling matriarch. A clumsy subplot about Kingsley’s dead daughter, the mother of his grand-daughter, is meant to be a deliberate reflection of his own father’s grief, but crammed within a maudlin tale of nostalgia, is just one echo too many.

In fact, for a film which is set in such a beautiful, untouched part of Australia’s coastline, you barely see any of it thanks to Bruce Young’s insistence on shooting every interaction in soft-focus close-ups, the type of intimate photography that one would expect from a low-budget mumblecore drama, not a $10M Australian feature. I presume it was an artistic decision to heighten the palpable nature of Kingsley’s recollections, trying to emulate the way we remember the tactility of specific memories in the style of Luca Guadagnino (who has mastered the cinematic sense of touch and taste within his own sun-soaked stories of awakenings), but this noticeable emphasis on tight close-ups starts to feel claustrophobic, which is ironic considering the expansive and isolated nature of the story’s setting.

This speaks to the film’s textual qualities, with its lack of interactivity or general observation upon the images presented, which basically highlights how framing this story as one of family-friendly nostalgia essentially glosses over these blatant issues. The on-going parallels of past and present finally collide when the grown-up Kingsley takes his grand-daughter to the 90 mile beach where he grew up, and the film finally feels like being creative – tender moments of having the elderly Rush sitting next to his younger self, revisiting his old house is all done a bit too late and too little – a much more cerebral take on this strained flashback structure might’ve made this remake feel more worthwhile.

Surprisingly, the only time racism is ever addressed is in one bizarre sequence where Storm Boy enters his local town (which is another strange choice to visualise, as it diminishes the isolated nature of the central father-son-Fingerbone dynamic) and two slack-jawed hunters address the kid’s doting pelican Mr. Percival as if he was a person of colour, warning him that he doesn’t want to see him around town “with that pelican anymore”. It’s a clunky conversation which would make sense if you were making a film about the prevalence of racism in Australia’s past and how a friendship between a white kid and an Aboriginal man defied the ignorance of others, but when it’s directed at a bug-eyed pelican, it just seems silly and over-written.

Storm Boy: Conclusion

The variables of films made for children are much more restricted than that of the typical adult-orientated feature, as they demand entertainment which is safe, secure and features recognisable and formulaic story beats and narrative decisions. This is under the presumed understanding that Shawn Seet’s unnecessary remake of Storm Boy is actually targeted for children, who might find themselves bored by the film’s stiff dramatic structure and focus on elderly notions of nostalgia and a sanitised flashback to an Australia that never quite was.

Nostalgia is one hell of a drug, and whilst this isn’t as aggressively coddling as last year’s misfire Swinging Safari, Storm Boy, much like the hang-dog protagonist at its centre, succumbs to its own nostalgia, desperate to return to a much simpler time where the modest story of one’s man relationship with a trio of pelicans could be worth such a big-budget revisit.

Despite its insistence on shooting all of its action in irritating soft-focus close-ups, the film never captures us within an emotional or visceral involvement, as it’s too enamoured with making its visual and aural signifiers wholly literal – this time, Storm Boy actually triggers storms, which would make his title more appropriate within the X-Men than down south in the Coorong. I’m not kidding.

What do you think of the upcoming slate of Australian films in 2019? Let us know!

Storm Boy is released in Australia on January 17, with a US release date currently scheduled for April 2019.