Breaker Morant (DVD)

...as a roustabout and horse breaker (hence the nickname). His relationship with his superior, Hunt, had clearly been strong - he had even been engaged to Hunt's sister - but something had gone wrong and the two had ended up far from home, engaged in a brutal and merciless struggle on the high veldt of the Transvaal. Morant is clearly a man intent on revenge, but is his motivation perhaps more deep, more base? We are left to ponder. We do know that ...
...yet he is a romantic: he write poetry and is egotistical enough to wish to see it published. At times we almost suspect that he has a death wish, perhaps a wish for a romantic end. Yet all is left unsaid and we are left to make our own minds up about the man.

Bryan Brown's performance is much more straightforward, for the simple reason that his character, Handcock, is a straightforward 'bloke'. He is never troubled by questions of ... more

It's probably true to say that most war films actually tell us very little about war or about the core motivations of the fighting soldier. They generally do little more than deafen us with noise and occasionally tug on a heart string or two. Now and again, however, a film comes along that doesn't rely solely on pyrotechnics and shallow sentiment to entertain us but instead strips off the veneer to examine what lies underneath: the dark motivations and personal conflicts; the impossible choices and easy hypocrisies. Breaker Morant is an Australian film that was released in 1980 and directed by Bruce Beresford, who also co-wrote the script, and it was a bold attempt to examine the realpolitik of war. The film script was based on a play of the same name that examined real-life events and real-life characters.

Lieutenant Harry 'Breaker' Morant (Edward Woodward) is an angry man on a mission, that mission being to catch the men responsible for the death and apparent mutilation of his friend and superior officer, Captain Simon Hunt (Terence Donovan). It's 1901 in the occupied Transvaal Republic in South Africa and Morant is a member of an ad hoc unit, the Bushveldt Carbineers, whose sole purpose is to wage unrestricted war on the enemy. That enemy is formidable: highly-mobile groups of mounted Afrikaner (Dutch-speaking) homelanders called Boer Commandos. When Morant's company overcomes a group of Boer fighters, one of the captured men is found to be wearing a khaki tunic. Morant, thinking the tunic was Hunt's, orders the man to be shot. Later, on advice from a mysterious intelligence officer, Capt. Alfred Taylor (John Waters), Morant orders six other Boer prisoners to be shot despite the fact that they had surrendered under a white flag. A German missionary whom Morant had suspected of being a Boer spy and who had spoken to the prisoners when expressly told not to is also found shot dead on the veldt the next day.

Back in Pretoria the British Commander in Chief, Lord Kitchener, is under increasing pressure to bring the unpopular South African War to an end and is persuaded that a timely prosecution for the death of the German missionary will partly appease Germany, a strong supporter of the Boer cause. Lt. Morant and a pair of 'colonials' who were with him, Lt. Peter Handcock (Bryan Brown) and Lt. George Witton (Lewis Fitz-Gerald), are spuriously charged with the murder; and to ensure that the sham will be settled quickly, another Australian, Maj. J.F. Thomas (Jack Thompson), who had been a humble country solicitor back in Australia, is called in to make what is assumed will be a token defence of the three accused. But Thomas proves to be a skilful and determined advocate and slowly begins to demolish the prosecution's case, much to the alarm of the High Command and of Lord Kitchener in particular. Will Thomas win the day and save the men, or will the Generals get their way and see the men face a firing squad?

Breaker Morant is essentially a courtroom drama, with the key scenes relevant to the case being shown in flashback. The film also shows the defendants together in custody between sessions and explores the relationship they have with each other as well as their growing respect for their sympathetic defender, Major Thomas. The whole crux of the drama is not in what the men did but in why they did it. Throughout the trial Thomas attempts to show that the trio were only obeying orders, however 'unofficial' and (more importantly) 'unwritten' those orders were. And yet if that were the only conflict in the film it would be a somewhat black and white affair: we would cheer for the men and boo the high-ranking officers intent on sacrificing them. But this is not a clear-cut drama. Just what were the motivations of the Carbineers and of Morant in particular?

Edward Woodward gives an assured and skilfully-vague performance as the enigmatic 'Breaker' Morant and we as viewers are never really sure whether to like him or not. The real-life Morant was a mysterious character, a well-to-do Englishman who had sailed to Australia where he had forged a career as a roustabout and horse breaker (hence the nickname). His relationship with his superior, Hunt, had clearly been strong - he had even been engaged to Hunt's sister - but something had gone wrong and the two had ended up far from home, engaged in a brutal and merciless struggle on the high veldt of the Transvaal. Morant is clearly a man intent on revenge, but is his motivation perhaps more deep, more base? We are left to ponder. We do know that he is a man who cares little about his fate, yet he is a romantic: he write poetry and is egotistical enough to wish to see it published. At times we almost suspect that he has a death wish, perhaps a wish for a romantic end. Yet all is left unsaid and we are left to make our own minds up about the man.

Bryan Brown's performance is much more straightforward, for the simple reason that his character, Handcock, is a straightforward 'bloke'. He is never troubled by questions of morality or the rightness of the cause. His outlook is simple: I just follow orders, mate. Brown makes Handcock a likeable rogue, a no-nonsense plain-speaking Aussie who never disguises his contempt for the pantomime of hypocrisy being performed around him. He knows he's being stitched up but he accepts his fate like the stoical soldier he is: Live by the sword, die by the sword. Death, for him, is an occupational hazard whether it comes in the face of the enemy or in front of a firing squad.

Jack Thompson probably just shades the honours for best acting performance. Unlike Morant and Handcock, who are grimly resigned to their fate, Major Thomas will not give up without a fight. As the trial proceeds, he strips away the pretence by skewering prosecution witness after prosecution witness so that what is left, although it may still suit the powers that be, is seen to be what it actually is: a sham. And everyone knows it. It's interesting that when Thomas addresses the bench none of the senior officers can quite look him in the eye.

Thomas' slow reasoned appeals to the court are perhaps the most powerful segments in the film. If Breaker Morant had been an American film these segments would probably have been written with a view to tugging the heart strings. Stirring music would have played and the audience would have been expected to shed a tear, yet at the same time thank the Lord for American justice. We would have missed the point. But not here. Thomas is no sentimentalist; he sees no justice and he is bloody angry. He knows what is happening but is determined not to do what was originally expected of him by going through the motions. It is his determination to scrap that brings the whole sham to its knees. Jack Thompson's performance is thoroughly convincing and he is superb throughout.

The general period feel of the film is also impressive, both in the overall look and in the manner and attitude of the characters. We are never in any doubt that we are in the Transvaal despite the film having been shot in South Australia, and the preponderance of meaty moustaches, army bands and stiff upper lips simply adds to the sepia quality of the piece. Yet it is the attitudes that convince the most. The seniors involved are clearly obliged to pay lip service to the notion that 'England prevails by playing the game', but we know that to be a ludicrous pretence. When, for instance, Handcock claims for an alibi that he was 'entertaining' a couple of Boer women at the time the German missionary was shot, the officer in charge of proceedings, Lt. Col. Denny (the excellent 'Bud' Tingwell), asks in all seriousness: "Did you sing for them?" When the carnal reality hits home he pauses for a moment then adds: "I must say... I find this sort of behaviour, in a soldier of the British Army, morally disgraceful." Handcock sums up the comical double-standards of the accusers with his curt response: "Well, they say a slice from a cut loaf is never missed!"

Rarely has a film dug more deeply into the motives and psyche of the soldier at war than Breaker Morant. It is also a film refreshingly free from the calculated sentimentality that weakens so many others in the genre. The Carbineers were not engaged in a gentlemanly pursuit motivated by patriotism, with its excesses limited by a code of honour. They were on the veldt to do just one thing: to hunt the Boer and kill the Boer and to continue doing so until the Boer had had enough. They had been created for that single purpose by men who had then lost their nerve and had retreated back into a convenient civilian mindset, only to then use civilian values against soldiers who were as far removed from civvy street and its cosy occupations as it was possible to be, and to do so for selfish (and political) ends. Such attempts to square the moral circle in matters of war are as equally prevalent today as they were a century ago.

Breaker Morant won a number of awards on its release and earned an Oscar nomination for 'Best adapted screenplay'. It's a first-class film, possessing a gritty realism that makes no concessions to those requiring winners and losers; there are neither in the film. The performances also are outstanding throughout. I should give the film five stars for being one of the best films I've seen in the war genre but I'll settle for four due to the likelihood that some may be put off by its bleak and cold-blooded nature.

(A slightly-altered version of this review appears under the same username on dooyoo.co.uk)

 

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