The Rover

There are those who believe that fic­tion film­mak­ing nat­u­ral­ly smug­gles with it the essen­tial truths of doc­u­men­tary. That is, we’re watch­ing invent­ed sto­ries and invent­ed char­ac­ters, but the pro­duc­tion itself is a tan­gi­ble thing that hap­pened in a real place. Each film is a doc­u­men­tary of its own pro­duc­tion. Run­ning with this a lit­tle fur­ther, the nation­al cin­e­ma of Aus­tralia furtive­ly tells us a lot about the place and the people.

Hav­ing nev­er vis­it­ed the coun­try, it’s hard to say with any cer­tain­ty whether Oz locals ride ramshod though scorched deserts in jum­ble sale oil­skin fetish wear, sport­ing a rip­pled sheen of brow-sweat and drink­ing lager like it’s some health-giv­ing elixir. Yet the sheer pro­lif­er­a­tion of films which appro­pri­ate the unfor­giv­ing land­scape as a way to imag­ine a time beyond society’s inevitable melt­down is telling – per­haps speak­ing of a wide­spread sense of fatal­is­tic malaise. If (or even, when) the met­ro­pol­i­tan hubs crum­ble under cap­i­tal­ism, nuclear bom­bard­ment, alien skir­mish, what­ev­er, where will the sur­vivors live out their remain­ing days? In the Outback?

With his superb and har­row­ing sec­ond fea­ture, direc­tor David Michôd has cho­sen to grap­ple with the con­cept of what hap­pens after the crash. Peo­ple aren’t sift­ing through the rub­ble and find­ing ways to rebuild. They’re drop­ping breeze­blocks on one-anoth­ers’ skulls to insure their suprema­cy in the food chain. To sum up, mur­der is no longer taboo. The Rover is set entire­ly in Aus­tralia, though it remains ambigu­ous as to whether the rest of the world has suf­fered a sim­i­lar igno­ble decline. Chi­na would appear to be doing okay, as rolling stock clam­bers across the desert daubed in Chi­nese char­ac­ters and haul­ing along sharp-shoot­ers with wrap-around shades. It’s nev­er stat­ed, but it seems like Aus­tralia is being divest­ed of its min­er­al wealth and the rem­nants of the bug-eyed human pop­u­la­tion are being left to duke it out Darwin-style.

The film is a wry antecedent to Aus­tralian post-new wave clas­sics such as George Miller’s Mad Max and John Hillcoat’s Ghosts… Of the Civ­il Dead. There is per­haps a cyn­i­cism to its knee-jerk belief that human­i­ty would nat­u­ral­ly grav­i­tate towards sav­agery in the case of a melt­down (as opposed to, say, a new sys­tem based on all-inclu­sive col­lec­tivised mung bean farms). But Michôd real­ly gives the impres­sion that he is tak­ing this mate­r­i­al very seri­ous­ly, and the tone of his apoc­a­lypse is one of extreme melan­choly and des­o­la­tion. He films scenes as extend­ed longueurs (occa­sion­al­ly a lit­tle too extend­ed). He employs celes­tial drones on the sound­track as a short­hand for his country’s regres­sion into monot­o­ne con­flict. He cap­tures peo­ple at their low­est ebb who all phys­i­cal­ly appear to be decom­pos­ing in sun­light – a nod to the ​’70s west­erns of Sam Peckinpah.

The con­cepts of lux­u­ry and friend­ship in this new world have been rad­i­cal­ly rede­fined. Cars are hard to come by, and even to leave them alone for a few min­utes would be fool­hardy. Guy Pearce’s moody, brood­ing Eric is intro­duced trundling along in a dirt-flecked fam­i­ly saloon, head­ing down an open road to nowhere. Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, a gang of hoods are scarper­ing from an unseen alter­ca­tion. They’ve left behind Rey (Robert Pat­tin­son) with a bul­let in his gut, and their squab­bling results in an acci­den­tal auto wreck – one which is staged as an amus­ing, iron­ic set-piece. Eric is slumped over a bar when his beloved car is jacked. The remain­der of the film charts his unflag­ging attempts to reclaim his bust-up prop­er­ty. Eric’s moti­va­tions remain a mys­tery until the final shot of the film.

Find­ing Rey slumped on the road, Eric swift­ly coerces him to become a trav­el­ling bud­dy as it tran­spires one of the crooks is Rey’s old­er broth­er (Scoot McNairy). Eric takes advan­tage of the men­tal slow­ness of his scrag­gy help­meet and implants the idea that Rey’s broth­er left him for dead and that he real­ly should be seek­ing revenge. The men plot a course for (the apoc­ryphal?) Kaloon, a town where bloody des­tiny awaits.

There’s some­thing com­mend­ably Stein­beck­ian about The Rover, blend­ing as it does an exco­ri­at­ing, dust­bowl state of the nation address (per ​‘The Grapes of Wrath’) with a tale of mis­matched com­pan­ions, whose sim­ple dreams and objec­tives are dashed at every hur­dle, that feels fond­ly ripped from ​‘Of Mice and Men’. Indeed, Pattinson’s Rey is every bit the Lennie Small to Eric’s George Mil­ton, from soul­ful camp­fire vig­ils in which the whis­pered philo­soph­i­cal dis­course is clear­ly a case of one-way traf­fic, to Rey’s small-mind­ed bungling, which often requires them to pack up and move on pre­ma­ture­ly (and with destruc­tion in their imme­di­ate wake). Eric and Rey’s rela­tion­ship is beau­ti­ful­ly drawn – even though a bond is formed, there’s nev­er a point where you could cer­ti­fi­ably call it friend­ship. It’s far more com­plex than that.

Hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly dis­sect­ed the inner work­ings of a crime fam­i­ly in his 2010 debut Ani­mal King­dom, Michôd here expands his crum­bling can­vas to imag­ine an entire nation in which democ­ra­cy has been replaced by the way of the gun. It’s a slow-burn­er that seethes with anger and Michôd does every­thing he can to deglam­ourise the out­pour­ings of sple­net­ic vio­lence. It’s rare that the cam­era cap­tures death in gris­ly close-up, or accen­tu­ates acts of mur­der with edit­ing or sound design. One guy, the part­ner of a friend­ly female sur­geon who tends to Rey’s wound, is shown walk­ing up to some parked cars to see what the dri­vers want. He’s instant­ly shot, close-range, in the head, though Michôd retains a POV per­spec­tive from inside the house. The vio­lence here is sud­den and banal, and for that rea­son it is all the more affecting.

Eric’s sin­gle-mind­ed fury marks the film’s emo­tion­al core. Michôd wrings a hair-trig­ger ten­sion not mere­ly from a law­less land­scape where human pres­ence sig­nals instant dan­ger, but also in keep­ing the rea­sons for Eric’s rage tight­ly under wraps. There’s a soli­tary moment in which his mask is allowed to briefly slip and a cor­rupt­ed com­pas­sion shines through. It’s here where the film attains a tac­it but mean­ing­ful con­nec­tion back to Ani­mal King­dom, as The Rover too is a work con­cerned with human beings as pri­mal, ani­mal­is­tic beasts. In fact, this time Michôd isn’t empha­sis­ing a gen­er­al inter­change­abil­i­ty between man and ani­mal, so much as he’s say­ing that man has now reached a sta­tus below that of animals.

An impor­tant aside sees Rey loung­ing in the front seat of a car, idly lip-synch­ing to a boun­cy pop song. It’s a love­ly digres­sion, flesh­ing out a sense of lost inno­cence which may have exist­ed in Rey before the time­line of the film, but also reframes a moment which would oth­er­wise seem entire­ly throw­away as exot­ic and poet­ic. Indeed, much of the tragedy of this sto­ry derives from inci­dents which occured months, years, decades before the events seen here.

Guy Pearce expert­ly intones a series of exis­ten­tial­ly-inclined mono­logues which hint at a hazy dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the world. Yet through one har­row­ing, late-game episode, we dis­cov­er that it was a sin­gle event which changed every­thing for him. It’s not when mur­der becomes nor­malised that social order will break down, it’s when social order breaks down that mur­der will become nor­malised. The Rover is not a hec­tor­ing polit­i­cal dia­tribe bemoan­ing the way we’re all head­ed. It’s a wist­ful lament for the pre­cious things we’ll lose when we final­ly get there.