Wow. I was not expected to be as blown away with Breaker Morant as I was. I had never heard of it before, there was barely any explanation of it in the books I read…it just kept popping up, again and again, without any explanation. I thought it would be a boring courtroom drama with an easy ending. Instead, it was a gritty, sad and realistic movie which spent less time engaging in legal fisticuffs than it did questioning the very grounds of justice itself. Sort of the polar opposite of A Few Good Men.
Breaker Morant is a film about an Englishman, Harry “Breaker” Morant, and two Australians stationed in South Africa during the Boer War. These gentlemen were court-marshaled for their execution of Boer prisoners and one German prisoner. Lord Kitchener ordered the court marshal in an attempt to quickly and peacefully wrap up with Boer War, and show Britain’s seriousness through its willingness to put its own men on trial.
What I love about this movie is that there is no question about whether or not Morant and his men did it. They did. The film skips between the courtroom and them on the field, and watches their story evolve. You see the rage, confusion and frustration that come through on the battlefield, you sense the dejection and disconnect that these men feel from their cause. You really feel that there is no explicit evil in these men, but that there are (as the attorney puts it) normal men acting under abnormal circumstances. The grittiness, the barrenness and the all-and-all boringness of war are felt explicitly (because, ya know, Nancy knows all about what war feels like).
The conflict in this film lay in the contradiction Britain is enacting. Lord Kitchener is trying to use his own men as political pawns. But all of this is completely his doing. He ordered the executions. He court-marshaled them to prove a point. The orders bore his signature, and yet so did the notices for their executions. This film is not unlike A Few Good Men at its heart, because it is about dutiful soldiers fulfilling their orders and then being reprimanded, and the hypocrisy present in any society that condemns its own men for acting under orders, or even for acting in a way that seemed reasonable to them given the pressures, confusions and degradations of battle.
But it’s way, way better than A Few Good Men. For one, the men being represented aren’t bland automatons automatically responding with their admiration for their duty and lot in the Army. Rather, they are complex, fleshy and full characters, who are full of confused duty and have genuine mistrust and questions for the country they are fighting for.
For two, the focus isn’t on the “crafty lawyer” getting them out of this. It’s about them. It’s about people being taken advantage by our justice system and their reactions and questions for that.
And most importantly, it really, densely explores the “You Can’t Handle The Truth” aspect that A Few Good Men only lightly touches on, and even mocks. It really delves deeply into the complexity of the confused nature of justice in wartime, and what we can and cannot hold men accountable for. Furthermore, it hints that we do need that duality of justice; that we need a separate code of laws to do our dirty work for us so we can keep living in our luxury, but we need a different code in that luxury.
The acting is fucking amazing- natural and realistic while still delivering powerful punches. This movie is full of long shots, beautiful close-ups and landscapes and smashcuts. It gives it a dry but powerful resonance, with such attention to subtlety that the emotional powerhouse moments are ten times as loaded. Drinking rotgut whiskey and climbing on tables reciting Lord Byron precedes serious discussions about the density of their sentence. Serious, long discussions in the courtroom are realistically undercut with sharp sarcastic and cynical jabs by the defendants. Overall, this movie felt real.
My only complaint is how quickly the story moves. Possibly because it is such an integral part of Australian history, and this is an Australian film, it is taken for granted that most Australians would know the details. For example, when Hunt’s crew approaches Devil’s Gorge for the quintessential skirmish that cost Hunt his life and Morant his sanity…I didn’t know that was going to happen. I didn’t even know Hunt’s character was that big of a deal at that point. But I presume that if I was Australian, I would. What I am saying is, this film took quite a bit of rewinding and a bit of outside research to fully comprehend.
I am mad. I am all full of wine and Australian protest songs I found on the internet. It’s 1AM and raining outside, and I am feeling more angry and disillusioned at the legal process than I did at the end of To Kill A Mockingbird. Because the death of Tom Robinson was an icon of racism, a literary construction to illustrate the dangers of racism and the folly of logical justice in the face of human inadequacy. This film does that too, but it’s not a fucking construction or icon. Breaker Morant was a real dude, flawed and complex, who acted as a pawn for our system of justice, was extremely taken advantage, and it cost him his life (ack! spoiler alert) (oh, whatever. Did you guys know the Titanic sank?). And there was nothing his attorney could have done in those closed door sessions of military law. Morant was going to be a political figure for the British, because the iconography these warring nations needed in order to settle their debts was larger and more powerful than any sense of individual justice, and more meaningful than an individual man’s life.
Nancy Is A Lawyer?
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
The cold hard reality of what actually happens in the real world contrasts my idealizations of Atticus Finch. Sure, with the correct lighting and intense music and all, I can become empowered by a dutiful failure. Fought as hard as you can but there’s still racism? Whelp, dust yourself off and begin again tomorrow. But in the real world, people get angry and riled-up. Knowing myself, I wonder if I could selflessly and stoically accept a lost cause. In this film, our lawyer did not embody the cold determination and reluctant acceptance of human folly that I have come to associate with the Lawyer Cliché. He was a fucked-up human, just like all the men he was representing. And he lost. And he has to deal with losing for the rest of his life. Not only must he reckon with that in his own personal conscience, but has to deal with living in this world for the rest of his life when he has faced its injustices so explicitly.
I know, this is a silly thing to realize. But it really serves as a reminder that if I practice law, I will still be myself. I will sometimes be a riled-up person faced with grave injustice, and there may very well be nothing that I can do about it. That might just be the way the world works. And honestly, I’d like to think I can raise my head like Atticus Finch and carry on with my life. But at the end of the day, I’d probably be a Major Thomas; I’d probably fight so hard I’d never want to fight again.
Maybe this means I just shouldn’t go into military law? But any law I could go into, the “good” and the “bad” won’t be explicitly defined. It’s not as if I can just go into law and represent unions and know that big corporations are the “bad guys” and I’m representing the “workers”. Life is not as simple as that. I will always be grappling within a system that is full of grave injustices, and I am not sure if my skin is tough enough to roll with those punches. I can be spat on, I can be threatened, I can be told that I am scum, sure. I’m a tough chick. But that’s all surface; am I tough enough in my very core to recognize how deeply fucked the world is and keep fighting anyway? That, I am not sure. A part of me hears that and just wants to get drunk and watch cartoons.
Furthermore (I feel so grown-up when I say furthermore), this film puts into question the very nature of justice. I touched on this with Liberty Vallance and Mockingbird, but it really cuts to the core here. Justice doesn’t make any fucking sense. Human beings are not smart enough to create a pristine and consistent system that isn’t ripe with hypocrisy. That fact is made even more evident when empires engage in mass genocide in a different context yet penalize a murder done singularly in the parameters of normal society.
I understand contextualizing morality, whatever. In a very abstract way, it’s a sort of floppy conversation. But this film really brings the futility of our justice system into full light in a very hard and stern manner. How can we have two prevailing systems of justice, one in the context of war and another in the context of civilian life? I mean, I understand that we have to; I’m not disputing that fact at all. But doesn’t the very existence of these two simultaneous forms of justice just prove that we are all just making this all this shit up as we go along?
Breaker Morant is the first film to make me genuinely nervous about whether or not aspiring for law is a good call.
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