"Nitram", the film based on the events leading up to the April 1996 Port Arthur massacre, caused a lot of debate before its release in late 2021. On one side was appreciation of the quality of the production by writer Shaun Grant and director Justin Kurzel, and the film’s thematic focus on the importance of gun control laws, and on the other side was an anguished cry from the living victims of the horror, a cry asking “why” reopen wounds that have not had time to heal.
Lyndon Riggall understood both arguments. The Tasmanian despair needed no amplification. He went to see the film to assess its value as social commentary and historical perspective. Riggall’s article (it is far more than a review of the film) is a clear, balanced and intelligent examination of the film and the debate it sparked.
I wasn’t sure about seeing Nitram. Our local Star Theatre in Launceston reasonably decided that it was important to give audiences the opportunity to access the film, but avoided any explicit fanfare or advertising. I completely understand and sympathise with those who will refuse to engage with it, or who argue that it should never have been allowed to exist in the first place. My own concession, having now seen it, is that as far as cinematic representations of such events might go, it makes a number of wise choices in dealing with its subject matter, ultimately elevating it beyond mere exploitation into a true reflection on, and acknowledgment of, tragedy.
Key among these clear-eyed decisions in creating the narrative of the film is that director Justin Kurzel and writer Shaun Grant never use the name of the killer. Although it could be argued that enough damage is done to the legacy of the victims by allowing an actor to perform as the character at all, especially in such a startlingly convincing representation, the simple fact that the gunman’s name is not used is significant. The inverted nature of the film’s title and character name is fairly hackneyed, but it cannot have been easy to balance the paradox of the simultaneous closeness and remove that the filmmakers sought, and this at least demonstrates that significant thought has been put into what is the most appropriate way to tell the story.
There is only one, albeit significant, point where this distance is compromised, and that is the opening of the film. The gunman, following a fireworks accident at the age of 10, is shown as a child in file footage from a Hobart burns unit, undertaking an interview that foreshadows the behaviour to come. It’s a noticeable slip-up to an otherwise extremely careful management of the killer’s identity, but it is also understandable why this was so tempting to include. It is a deeply resonant demonstration of his developing psychology and pathology, and the significant chronological detachment of this from later events of the narrative helps soften its impact in a manner that feels defensible.
The film carefully handles its purpose and avoids easy explanation. Whatever the reality may be, simplistic representations of parental abuse and such cinematic clichés as escalating animal cruelty in the killer’s childhood are avoided here in favour of opening up further questions rather than providing answers.
Nitram is best in the moments where it examines the wider community, and in particular a crucial scene which shows just how easy buying a semi-automatic weapon once was in this country, and how the minimal barriers that were in place could be jumped with the right amount of cash. While the final scenes of the film are disturbing, Kurzel’s wisest decision is that the events of that awful day at the Broad Arrow Café are not explicitly shown. It is an impressive commitment to the fact that the film is not simply about constraining the gruesome past in visceral celluloid, and that it instead exists as a very human interrogation of how this awful tragedy could have happened at all, even if that question is, in many ways, impossible to answer conclusively.
Nitram’s only significant flaw, as far as I can see, is its sense of landscape. Although its portrait of life in the 1990s is pitch-perfect, right down to its plastic-covered couches, the dryness of its hills and the crowded urbanity of many of its residential areas, and the occasional incongruous glimpse of buildings with “Geelong” clearly labelled on the side of them, means that no-one who has ever been to Tasmania’s south will for one second believe that they are really watching events that are taking place there.
Of course, while I am sure that fear of community reprisal is a large factor in this decision, it is also, arguably, a necessary mercy on the part of the filmmakers. It is one thing to release a film like this in a state still shattered by the story’s tragedy two decades on, quite another to create it here, having a blond-haired actor retreading the horrific decisions of a monster in its small-town streets and along its wild coastlines. Artistically, it is the wrong choice for the film, which suffers as a result. Morally, it is perhaps the only choice.
I often think about Rodney Pople’s controversial inclusion of the figure of the gunman in his Glover-winning image of Port Arthur: a pronouncement that, if nothing else, demonstrates how terribly and conclusively the tragedy of that day is ingrained in both our consciousness and the landscape itself. Ultimately, the only action of any consequence following such an awful, community-shattering event, is to make sure that we learn something from it, and it is here that Kurzel’s film proves most value in its existence. A textual epilogue describes what our political leaders did following that awful, awful day, but it resists self-righteousness, also describing the challenges that remain for us to face if we are ever to move on.
Whether Nitram could be argued to be profiting from a state’s pain or not, what it finally calls for is reflection: on the way societies and families treat those who reach a crisis point of mental health, on loss, and on the ongoing challenge of guns in this country. It is not easy watching, and I have no doubt that there are many for whom witnessing the film will cause nothing but pain, and who will find it best avoided altogether.
Nevertheless, its intent and final composition is clearly defined by a desperate hope to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again, and that is perhaps all that we can ask for.
Lyndon Riggall is a northern Tasmanian writer and English teacher at Launceston College and co-host, with Annie Warburton, of the Tamar Valley Writers’ Festival Podcast. His first picture book for children, Becoming Ellie, was published by Forty South in 2019. He can be found at www.lyndonriggall.com.
