The parched outback saps all the juice from their hearts. In The Rover, David Michôd’s Aussie western that opens this week, two men traverse a lawless wasteland looking for a stolen car and maybe for the last shreds of empathy. Something bad has happened — to the world and its population. The film blithely leaves out any explanation, but we gather that it was some sort of financial apocalypse that reduces Australia to an expanse of sand-blustering wilderness. The collapse renders the local currency useless (only the US dollar is accepted) and pushes men either towards stupor or barbarism.
One of the most promising Aussie directors, Michôd draws from his predecessors to arrive at a vision of the soulless outback. We’re reminded of Mad Max for the band of dusty desperados and mucky violence, and from the intense, ruthless neo-Western of John Hillcoat’s The Proposition. But The Rover also aspires to go beyond the sad allure of physical wretchedness into some sort of meditative reflection — the terrain of Peter Weir’s Picnic At Hanging Rock — to chart a cerebral trip of the characters who roam the vast and inhuman geography. An isolated country/continent, Australia has given its filmmakers a sense of physical giganticism that’s both stunning and scary. As in many other films from there, The Rover is a story about hard men driven harder by their surroundings, as they try to discover if their softer side is still alive within.
Michôd pulls it off, to an extent, and the credit goes to the eerie dynamics of the two leads. Guy Pearce plays Eric, a man with an unknown past — every past is unknown here — whose car is stolen by three armed men when the film opens. Robert Pattinson then proves that, after all, there’s life after Twilight, a better, less embarrassing life. He plays Rey, a half-autistic, half-stammering younger brother of one of the car thieves. When Eric finds Rey beaten to a pulp and left to die on the side of the road — Pattinson’s smashed-up face is part of his new persona — he forces the young man to take him to the hiding place of those who took his car.
Their road trip through the depopulated towns makes up the nearly the entire narrative. This is a desperate odyssey that leads the two men (and us) to see the post-apocalyptic landscape of Michôd’s imagination: there’s a humid boy-brothel where Eric goes to get a gun, a farmhouse where a vet tends to Rey’s wounds, a motel where they meet Chinese-speaking vagrants (there are a lot of Chinese in this dystopia), and some sort of military barracks, the only sign of authorities in the dog-eat-dog non-nation. But the real story lies in the push-and-pull tension between Eric, a tough guy with nothing to lose, and Rey, a timid, awkward misfit who’s clearly not cut out to survive in the world of macho swagger and violence.
Michôd prowled this territory before. His first film Animal Kingdom (2010) is a crime drama about a Melbourne family of gangsters; with a touch of Scorsese, the story is told largely through the eye of a shy teenager who watches these tattooed, tough-talking thugs live their dangerous lives. The social structure and behavioural pattern of a male-only sub-universe are rigid and sometimes ridiculous, but they’re indispensable for their survival. Guy Pearce is in that film too, playing a detective who tries to pry the boy away from the clutch of the hoodlum family.
But what can melt hard men? Sometimes women, as we’ve seen that in so many gangster films. But sometimes, like in The Rover, which is set in a world that has virtually no women, it takes a moment of epiphany, or maybe a dog, or maybe deaths, or maybe the fatigue of the endless struggle, to help hard men get in touch with the vestige of humanity in them. Michôd strives for such moments — if there’s a quibble, it’s that his effort sometimes shows — and it’s Pearce’s silent volcano and Pattinson’s corrupt innocence that deliver them. This isn’t an easy film to watch; the violence is graphic and the mood apocalyptic. And while Michôd may not achieve that transcendental awakening in the vagabonds of this god-forsaken country, they’ve braved through enough hellfire for us to have mercy, and to care about them.
