‘Jasper Jones’ Review: What Makes An Australian Classic?
This film will make you feel things.
Jasper Jones, Craig Silvey’s best-selling novel about prejudice and coming-of-age in a West Australian town, has very quickly earned itself a rather tiresome reputation as Australia’s To Kill A Mockingbird.
The titular Jones is an enigmatic Aboriginal teen who becomes the prime suspect in a gruesome crime, primarily because of his race, while the protagonist (his Scout Finch proxy) is Charlie Bucktin, a white teenager living in the small town of Corrigan at the end of 1965. Jasper knocks on Charlie’s window on Christmas Day looking for help, and the pair go searching for the culprit. The book, which won Indie Book of the Year and was nominated for the Miles Franklin Award in 2010, has already been minted as an Aussie classic.
Jasper Jones has been reinvented in many ways since. In 2014, Perth’s Gecko Theatre premiered a new stage adaptation, written by Kate Mulvany, which was revived last year by Belvoir St Theatre and Melbourne Theatre Company. And now, this: a film adaptation directed by Rachel Perkins (Brand Nue Dae), and starring Levi Miller (Pan, Red Dog: True Blue) as Charlie and the excellent Aaron L. McGrath (Glitch, Ready For This) as Jasper.
Probing and straightforward, the film is unflashy enough to be broadly appealing and roundly enjoyable. What it is missing is some flavour — the undeniable quirk and oddness that characterises much of Australian cinema both old (Muriel’s Wedding, early Baz Luhrmann, Mad Max) and new (Predestination, Jocelyn Moorhouse’s glorious The Dressmaker). But the film has plenty of heart and good intentions, and is boosted by solid performances from its cast of young’uns and old vets.
Parable and Prejudice
Although it’s somewhat reductive to compare Jasper Jones to the Harper Lee icon To Kill A Mockingbird, it’s certainly an easy comparison to draw. A white child gets their first taste of prejudice while observing second-hand the racism their non-white compatriots endure. A gentle father struggles to protect his growing child from the evils in the world. A mysterious introvert is misunderstood for the dangerous ‘town weirdo’. All these comparison points and more exist in both Jasper Jones and Mockingbird.
I didn’t really care for the coming of age story of Charlie discovering the Big, Bad World of Adulthood; although perhaps that’s because I didn’t love Miller’s stilted and bland performance. Sweetly spoken though Miller is, it’s hard to care about Charlie — an incidental witness to other people’s misfortune, when there are so many more interesting things going on to far more interesting characters.
Like many allegories of prejudice, this one is old-fashioned. Charlie lives in outback Australia in the 1960s, and the film’s photography and design revels in that fact. In fact, a lot of the best adaptations made by Australians recently have been about the past: The Dressmaker is set in the cautiously flamboyant post-War 1950s; and TV’s late, lamented Puberty Blues is a retro triumph, set beachside in the 1970s.
Puberty Blues expertly reconfigured its attractive retro trappings to skewer modern gender politics among Australia’s larrikin flag-bearers. As such, the book, the 1980s film and the recent TV adaptation have become a kind of timeless anti-prejudicial bible for young girls wading into Australia’s marsh of mateship. Similarly, Jasper Jones offers something to retro-focused Australian literature that is sorely needed: a contemporary political perspective on our racist history.
The issues of racial prejudice in Jasper Jones are not just limited to the town’s ill-treatment of the outcast Jasper; Charlie’s best friend, Jeffrey, is Vietnamese-Australian, and he and his parents suffer mightily at the peak of Australia’s controversial involvement in the Vietnam War. Despite the film’s centring of Charlie and Jasper’s relationship, it is the racism suffered by Jeffrey’s family that hit me hardest as I watched. Though Miller is collecting most of the early critical praise, keen, daffy newcomer Kevin Long is the true revelation as Jeffrey. Long, whose character is mostly sidelined apart from one tense town cricket match, is also perhaps the only young actor able to successfully balance Perkins’ odd blend of sadness and goofy humour.
Still, the overwhelming feeling you get as you watch both Jasper and Jeffrey struggle through injustice is a rather depressing one: not much has changed. Jasper is an outcast because of his mixed Aboriginal heritage; he is suspected, roughed-up and mistreated by police. This is not unfamiliar in today’s mistreatment of Indigenous people by police. And Jeffrey and his family, refugees from the Vietnam War, must bear the brunt of the Corrigan residents’ frustrations about their involvement in the bloody conflict, just as we force legions of Muslim refugees to suffer for the disparate actions of a few.
The film, beautifully designed and gauzy with retro appeal, could’ve made a few stronger connections between 1965 Corrigan and 2017 Australia; but for those looking, the parallels are there.
Spooky (But Beautiful) Stories
Not much is explained about why Jasper approaches Charlie, a boy he barely knows, for help. Then again, the film is at its best when it lets mysteries lie or exposition go unsaid. Whatever the reason, Charlie and Jasper are wrapped up in a grizzly local crime, trying to find the real culprit before Jasper is wrongfully convicted.
It’s a shame that Miller and McGrath don’t have quite the same spark of connection that Miller and Long share in their scenes together. Perhaps they are also searching for the motivation behind this unlikely pair up. Individually, though, both boys shine when the camera sticks close to them and waits, allowing them room to breathe and emote.
Miller looks breathtaking and sympathetic through cinematographer Mark Wareham’s lens, and McGrath once again displays his capacity for extraordinary range in a single, piercing look. Lumped with a role that is unfortunately two-dimensional and largely absent of the comedy that Perkins uses to lighten the film, McGrath has perhaps the toughest job — absorbing all our empathy without providing much relief. Lucky he is as precise and thoughtful here as he is in Glitch, where he plays a rounder and more forgiving role.
Perkins is an observant director with a taste for pathos. In fact, she’s so close to Charlie’s perspective she’s practically sitting on Miller’s shoulder throughout. She also has an unusual talent for finding small, beautiful perspectives on the landscape and the retro design that might be missed by another, less inventive director. Still, she is hampered by how close she must stick to Silvey’s book (in a script written by Silvey himself and the screenwriter Shaun Grant), and despite her attentiveness to Charlie’s perspective, something is lost in the visual translation.
Perhaps it is the strange combination of grizzly pessimism and upbeat humour that is so off-putting. For one (and this is a spoiler of sorts), Perkins clings obsessively to the opening tableau of a girl (Laura Wishart, Jasper’s girlfriend) hanging from a towering eucalypt. The imagery here –with a shadowy and eerily serene bush landscape slashed open by a bright and bloated figure in a white nightgown — is beautiful but disturbing. Next minute, Jeffrey and Charlie are joking about superheroes on the dried-out grass of a cricket pitch. I can see what Perkins was aiming for here: some levity from the darkness of the central plot. However, I’m just not sure the juxtaposition does more than jar the senses.
The best work comes from the adults, of course — veterans of the Australian screen who lend gravitas and ease to Perkins at-times risky tone. Dan Wyllie, who is one of the hardest working, and most under-appreciated actors working in Australia, is very good here as Charlie’s spongy father, Wes. He’s only outshone by Toni Colette, who returns to form as Charlie’s brittle mother, Ruth.
Poor Ruth is trapped unmercifully in her poisonous fibro house, alternating hot and cold when Charlie and Wes test her patience. Colette does an immense amount for a character who, in a lesser actor’s hands, might be thoroughly unsympathetic. By far the film’s best moment is a small, bright scene where Ruth, alone in the kitchen but for the radio, turns a moment of frustration into a soothing, silly dance. Hugo Weaving, who plays Jasper Jones’s Boo Radley, Mad Jack (and who will now only inhabit roles that appear grandly at the end of a credits list) is, as ever, delicious and familiar.
Ultimately, it’s Perkins’ keen attention to the Australian small town existence that has paid off here; all in all the film is a resounding success. Though somewhat brisk in its approach (it knows where it’s taking the audience and will get them there without a detour, thanks), it reaches occasionally lofty heights while providing you with a visual treat and a smidge of a heartache.
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Jasper Jones is in cinemas now.
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Matilda Dixon-Smith is a freelance writer, editor and theatre-maker, and a card-carrying feminist. She also tweets intermittently and with very little skill from @mdixonsmith.