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Black and White (2002)

 


Black and White (2002), directed by the late Craig Lahiff and scripted by Louis Nowra (Radiance, Cosi), is based on the true story of Max Stuart. Stuart, played by David Ngoombujarra, was an Aboriginal man coerced by police to confess to murdering a white girl in Ceduna in the 1950s, and consequently sentenced to hang. The film dramatizes the efforts of his Adelaide defense lawyers David O'Sullivan (Robert Carlyle) and Helen Devaney (Kerry Fox), in the face of steely opposition from prosecutor Roderic Chamberlain (Charles Dance).   

Living in Adelaide in the early 2000s, I was aware of Black and White’s production, as import stars Carlyle and Dance’s presence in town was deemed newsworthy. I was also aware of its theatrical release, but—truthfully—I blinked and missed it. A week in and out of theatres shouldn’t be all that surprising for a low-budget Australian film, but Black and White had some commercial aesthetics that should have extended its screen life: the courtroom thriller was a multiplex staple of the previous decade, thanks to multiple John Grisham adaptations, A Few Good Men, Sleepers, and their ilk, while Robert Carlyle—in the wake of Trainspotting, The Full Monty, Ravenous, and The World is Not Enough—still felt like someone who’d be headlining films of various scales for decades to come.

Having said that, Black and White also feels, cinematically speaking, belated. I tend to think of 2002 as a transitional moment in Australian film, marked by the films that were partly financed by and debuted at that year's Adelaide Festival of Arts, including Rolf de Heer's The Tracker and Ivan Sen's Beneath Clouds. Though also released that year, stylistically Black and White resembles the Australian New Wave heritage dramas of the 1970s and 80s, and thematically and ideologically it’s cut from the same cloth as late 80s overseas productions Cry Freedom and Mississippi Burning, films in which white directors (Richard Attenborough and Alan Parker) dramatize injustices against blacks from white liberal vantage points via white protagonists/investigators. I like those films, and I like Black and White, but just as those international films have been usurped in cultural cachet by works from twenty-first century black directors like Spike Lee, Steve McQueen, Ava DuVernay, Ryan Coogler, and Jordan Peele, so too does the emergence of Warwick Thornton, Rachel Perkins, and Ivan Sen locally render Lahiff’s film a relic of sorts.

But as relics go, Black and White is undeniably well-meaning and well-made. There is modest but thoughtful period detail in the art direction and costuming, while economical establishing shots of Adelaide locations with mid-century facades intact effectively sketch the time and place. Carlyle is solid but uninteresting as O’Sullivan, while Ngoombujarra, Fox, and Dance have more flavour to play with, as do Colin Friels, Roy Billing, Heather Mitchell, and Ben Mendehlson in smaller roles (the latter as Rupert Murdoch, whose budding media empire advocated against capital punishment and on Stuart’s behalf).

In its resemblance to New Wave heritage dramas, Black and White carries the ‘Seal of Good Housekeeping’ Pauline Kael disparagingly applied to films of that ilk, but it’s much better than the other Lahiff film I've seen, Heaven’s Burning: a ropey crime road movie starring Russell Crowe, again scripted by Nowra and filmed in and around Adelaide (there dodgily substituting for Sydney).

Ben 

 

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