Lucky Country

It’s Australia, 1902, and former English schoolteacher widower Nat (Aden Young) is raising his 12-year-old son Tom (Toby Wallace) and teenage daughter,Sarah (Hannah Mangan Lawrence) in a remote bush cabin and struggling with a losing battle to survive on the land. When three strangers from the gold-fields ride up, one of them an injured young man, they are guardedly offered Nat’s hospitality. When it is discovered that one has found gold, tensions arise between all six, leading to disastrous outcomes

The only thing that I can think of to explain the awkwardness of Kriv Stenders' film is that it was cobbled together from the outtakes of the much better movie it was intended to be.

Clearly that is not the case but Lucky Country is a mass of incongruities: clumsy and clichéd yet demonstrating a quite impressive directorial skill-set, telling an Australian story but so heavily derivative of the Hollywood Western that it looks and feels more like California, 1902, with a little bit of Hardyesque Wessex provincialism and a dollop of The Piano (1993) thrown in for good measure; a script by Andy Cox which is ambitious yet lumbered with contrived dialogue and at times opaque; acting which is often unconvincing and but sometimes, as in the case of Pip Miller who plays the leader of a trio of ne’er-do-wells who effectively hold the family prisoner, outstanding; some impressive visual style yet also interference from distracting hand-held camerawork, and a score that similarly lumbers from the effective to the inappropriate.

A tale of frontier desperation and human greed, the story is ripe for a The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948) type of mythic moral lesson as the reading from William Lane the utopianist who started the New Australia colony in Paraguay in 1893 well suggests it might be. Stenders and Cox don’t take it there however but rather give us an unfocussed film that manages to be less than the sum of its parts.

 

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