[TrueFaith77]

20.Nitram (Justin Kurzel): grade: A

The title cards at the end of Nitram resonate more deeply than activist-filmmaking addendum to the true-story of Australia’s most deadly mass shooting and subsequent gun control legislation. Kurzel deploys many aesthetic devices to expand the cultural implications of this character study. A shot of conflicted mother Judy Davis reflected in a window superimposed over a tv news program perfectly visualizes Kurzel’s conflation of the intimate and the objective, the personal and the national. As the titular son, Caleb Landry Jones reaches out painfully for human connection. Pain is Kurzel’s subject, the emotional wavelength of cruelly nicknamed Nitram. He calls himself “slow” but his name is backwards. His introspection exposes profound alienation (when this wild child wears a suit, he looks like a clown). Palpable pain defines Jones’s interactions with Judy Davis (who explains her maternal ambivalence), Kurzel’s wife Eddie Davis (an eccentric who introduces Nitram to Gilbert & Sullivan), and his father Anthony LaPaglia (nuzzling up to his son after a mental breakdown). As 4 outsiders (plus pretty surfer Sean Keenan dramatizing a culture’s insensitivity), this cast proves worthy of Mike Leigh troupe’s politically incisive theatricality. Only Leigh was never this tender or brutal, thanks to Kurzel’s completely unsentimental mastery. Handheld shallow focus alternates with deep-focus tracking shots, Australian topography contextualizes kinetic sequences of a car crash and surfing. All of it exemplifying Kurzel’s crystalline lighting. Take that, Kubrick!