Based on Peter Carey's 2000 novel, written for the screen by Shaun Grant, and directed by nm2355933, True History of the Kelly Gang is a film about lies. More specifically, it looks at the pivotal role lies play in cultural myth-making, how every myth is a fiction, a subjective interpretation and reframing of real events. Importantly, as with the novel on which it's based, True History is a work of historical fiction which invents characters and incidents, weaving such elements into what we know of the real Ned Kelly. It's rugged, fierce, bleak, sexually ambiguous, and psychologically exhausting, with universally exceptional acting and some quite stunning cinematography. It takes itself very seriously, which will probably put off those looking for the more casual entertainment of nm0429964's rather bland Ned Kelly (2003), but if you're in the mood for something complex, challenging, and esoteric, you could certainly do worse.
Divided into three sections ("Boy", "Man", and "Monitor"), the film is structured by way of a voiceover wherein Kelly (George MacKay) is writing a memoir for his daughter, so she can know the man behind the myth. We begin when he is 12 (played by an exceptional Orlando Schwerdt), meeting his fierce mother Ellen (a ferocious Essie Davis), his perpetually drunk father John 'Red' Kelly (Ben Corbett), his two younger siblings, the lecherous Sgt. O'Neill (Charlie Hunnam proving once again he can't do accents; I think he's supposed to be Welsh), and Harry Power (a Falstaffian Russell Crowe), a notorious bushranger who Kelly spends time with. Years later, the now-adult Kelly meets the hedonistic Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick (a slimy Nicholas Hoult) and the good-natured Mary Hearn (the always exceptional Thomasin McKenzie), with whom he begins a relationship. However, after a disagreement with Fitzpatrick, Kelly finds himself on the run, accompanied by his close friend and possible lover Joe Byrne (Sean Keenan), his brother Dan (Earl Cave), and Dan's friend Steve Hart (Louis Hewison). Recruiting young men fed up with British colonialism, Kelly forms the Kelly Gang, and as their reputation grows, the authorities determine to hunt them down at all costs.
Much of the detail in True History is fabricated, as it was in the novel. For example, Mary is a fictitious character, and as far as we know, Kelly had no children. The depiction of Ellen is also fictitious - in the film, she's a fiercely proud pillar of the community, but in reality, she was disliked and most people shunned her. Another fabrication is the Kelly Gang's tendency to proclaim themselves "The Sons of Sieve", a reference to a fictitious Irish secret society. Perhaps the most controversial fictional element concerns Kelly's sexuality. There's a very strong Oedipal undertone throughout the first act, and later, he's presented in a manner that suggests bisexuality. The scene where we first meet Joe, for example, sees him and Kelly playfully wrestling for a book, and later he and a naked Fitzpatrick have a conversation with unmistakable homoerotic chemistry.
The issue of lies, myth-making, and fabrication is introduced immediately, with the opening caption telling us, "nothing you are about to see is true". Subsequently, one of the first lines of dialogue is Kelly warning his daughter about people who will "confuse fiction for fact", saying that the only account she can accept as true is his own, because "every man should be the author of his own history". The irony in all of this is that in real life, Kelly never wrote such a manuscript for his daughter because he never had a daughter, thus creating more layers atop the dichotomy of calling the film "True History" and immediately asserting none of it is true.
One of the points of Carey's novel, and something very much reproduced in the film, is the malleability of history, the notion that history isn't a fixed monolithic thing, but that it changes with each act of interpretation. The prime example of this is Kelly's status as a symbol, the importance of which grows in a manner relatively divorced from actual events. In this sense, the film shows that in the process of a true story becoming a myth, truth is rarely a priority; as newspaper editor Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young) says in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend". True History is partly about how the legend of Ned Kelly became 'fact'.
What's especially interesting in all of this is that the film sits somewhere between the two extremes of Kelly scholarship - a hero for the common man or a psychopathic murderer. Although Kurzel explains Kelly's violent tendencies by tracing them back to a bad childhood and years of British oppression, he doesn't shy away from depicting the Stringybark Creek incident, when Kelly killed three policemen, all of them unarmed, two of them after they'd already surrendered. The Ned Kelly seen here is a savage - he's nothing like the mythical pseudo-Robin Hood of folktale nor the anti-establishment punk played by Mick Jagger in Tony Richardson's Ned Kelly (1970) nor the charming rogue played by Heath Ledger in Jordan's film - he's a violent blood-thirsty sociopath who kills because he enjoys it.
The film's greatest strength, however, is the mesmeric cinematography by Ari Wegner, which is some of the best I've seen in years. Having already done incredible work on Lady Macbeth (2016) and In Fabric (2018), she's operating in another realm here. Her real pièce de résistance is the climactic shootout at Glenrowan. Look at the shot of the police carrying torches in the pitch dark, which she impressionistically renders as turning the men luminescent. Or the POV shot from inside Kelly's helmet, with only a tiny slit to see through; it's chaotic, confusing, disorientating, and claustrophobic, as it's supposed to be. Or the shot of a raging fire, the flames highlighted against the pitch-black night. If you appreciate good cinematography, you should definitely watch this scene. It's absolutely Oscar-worthy. Which means it has zero chance of winning her an Oscar.
In terms of problems, Hunnam's accent is hilariously bad, and the film is a little slow in places, and could perhaps do with losing 10-15 minutes, as the narrative does sag a couple of times. And, as I already said, those expecting something in the vein of Jordan's film will be sorely disappointed (although that's not the film's fault - it's not trying to be akin to previous Kelly movies).
Starkly beautiful, psychologically taxing, thematically complex, this is very much a return to form for Kurzel. Acknowledging the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of getting to the reality of such a widely known symbol as Ned Kelly, the film suggests that in the formation of such myths, truth is jettisoned early. However, if even history itself is open to reformulation, then why not so with myths? Why not let the legend supersede the fact? Does truth really matter all that much when dealing with something as significant as a national mythos?
Divided into three sections ("Boy", "Man", and "Monitor"), the film is structured by way of a voiceover wherein Kelly (George MacKay) is writing a memoir for his daughter, so she can know the man behind the myth. We begin when he is 12 (played by an exceptional Orlando Schwerdt), meeting his fierce mother Ellen (a ferocious Essie Davis), his perpetually drunk father John 'Red' Kelly (Ben Corbett), his two younger siblings, the lecherous Sgt. O'Neill (Charlie Hunnam proving once again he can't do accents; I think he's supposed to be Welsh), and Harry Power (a Falstaffian Russell Crowe), a notorious bushranger who Kelly spends time with. Years later, the now-adult Kelly meets the hedonistic Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick (a slimy Nicholas Hoult) and the good-natured Mary Hearn (the always exceptional Thomasin McKenzie), with whom he begins a relationship. However, after a disagreement with Fitzpatrick, Kelly finds himself on the run, accompanied by his close friend and possible lover Joe Byrne (Sean Keenan), his brother Dan (Earl Cave), and Dan's friend Steve Hart (Louis Hewison). Recruiting young men fed up with British colonialism, Kelly forms the Kelly Gang, and as their reputation grows, the authorities determine to hunt them down at all costs.
Much of the detail in True History is fabricated, as it was in the novel. For example, Mary is a fictitious character, and as far as we know, Kelly had no children. The depiction of Ellen is also fictitious - in the film, she's a fiercely proud pillar of the community, but in reality, she was disliked and most people shunned her. Another fabrication is the Kelly Gang's tendency to proclaim themselves "The Sons of Sieve", a reference to a fictitious Irish secret society. Perhaps the most controversial fictional element concerns Kelly's sexuality. There's a very strong Oedipal undertone throughout the first act, and later, he's presented in a manner that suggests bisexuality. The scene where we first meet Joe, for example, sees him and Kelly playfully wrestling for a book, and later he and a naked Fitzpatrick have a conversation with unmistakable homoerotic chemistry.
The issue of lies, myth-making, and fabrication is introduced immediately, with the opening caption telling us, "nothing you are about to see is true". Subsequently, one of the first lines of dialogue is Kelly warning his daughter about people who will "confuse fiction for fact", saying that the only account she can accept as true is his own, because "every man should be the author of his own history". The irony in all of this is that in real life, Kelly never wrote such a manuscript for his daughter because he never had a daughter, thus creating more layers atop the dichotomy of calling the film "True History" and immediately asserting none of it is true.
One of the points of Carey's novel, and something very much reproduced in the film, is the malleability of history, the notion that history isn't a fixed monolithic thing, but that it changes with each act of interpretation. The prime example of this is Kelly's status as a symbol, the importance of which grows in a manner relatively divorced from actual events. In this sense, the film shows that in the process of a true story becoming a myth, truth is rarely a priority; as newspaper editor Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young) says in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend". True History is partly about how the legend of Ned Kelly became 'fact'.
What's especially interesting in all of this is that the film sits somewhere between the two extremes of Kelly scholarship - a hero for the common man or a psychopathic murderer. Although Kurzel explains Kelly's violent tendencies by tracing them back to a bad childhood and years of British oppression, he doesn't shy away from depicting the Stringybark Creek incident, when Kelly killed three policemen, all of them unarmed, two of them after they'd already surrendered. The Ned Kelly seen here is a savage - he's nothing like the mythical pseudo-Robin Hood of folktale nor the anti-establishment punk played by Mick Jagger in Tony Richardson's Ned Kelly (1970) nor the charming rogue played by Heath Ledger in Jordan's film - he's a violent blood-thirsty sociopath who kills because he enjoys it.
The film's greatest strength, however, is the mesmeric cinematography by Ari Wegner, which is some of the best I've seen in years. Having already done incredible work on Lady Macbeth (2016) and In Fabric (2018), she's operating in another realm here. Her real pièce de résistance is the climactic shootout at Glenrowan. Look at the shot of the police carrying torches in the pitch dark, which she impressionistically renders as turning the men luminescent. Or the POV shot from inside Kelly's helmet, with only a tiny slit to see through; it's chaotic, confusing, disorientating, and claustrophobic, as it's supposed to be. Or the shot of a raging fire, the flames highlighted against the pitch-black night. If you appreciate good cinematography, you should definitely watch this scene. It's absolutely Oscar-worthy. Which means it has zero chance of winning her an Oscar.
In terms of problems, Hunnam's accent is hilariously bad, and the film is a little slow in places, and could perhaps do with losing 10-15 minutes, as the narrative does sag a couple of times. And, as I already said, those expecting something in the vein of Jordan's film will be sorely disappointed (although that's not the film's fault - it's not trying to be akin to previous Kelly movies).
Starkly beautiful, psychologically taxing, thematically complex, this is very much a return to form for Kurzel. Acknowledging the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of getting to the reality of such a widely known symbol as Ned Kelly, the film suggests that in the formation of such myths, truth is jettisoned early. However, if even history itself is open to reformulation, then why not so with myths? Why not let the legend supersede the fact? Does truth really matter all that much when dealing with something as significant as a national mythos?