With Wolfram, Australian Western specialist Warwick Thornton finally hits the mark

Wolfram is another name for tungsten, a precious metal that must be extracted from mines with the aid of pickaxes, dynamite, and small hands capable of pulling it from rock veins. Max and Kid are two Aboriginal children in the service of Billy, a white man who is a bit of a father and a bit of a master, sending them underground to extract the metal. That young Aboriginal people are in the service of white adults, a bit father and a bit owner, is a common circumstance in Wolfram, as we soon find a young Aboriginal man named Philomac preparing lunch for a paranoid Caucasian man. The boy had already been the protagonist of a previous film by the director, Sweet Country (screened in Venice in 2017) and now serves as a cook and handyman for another white man.

Watching Wolfram, one feels a bit sorry for Alberto Barbera, artistic director of the Venice Film Festival and a great Western enthusiast, who willingly gave space to Warwick Thornton at the Lido with very boring and disappointing films. It's a shame because he couldn't champion this film, which is, if not a sequel to Sweet Country, at least its spiritual heir.

Warwick Thornton has finally made a very successful Western

Warwick Thornton, in fact, never strays far from the genres and themes close to his heart: his cinema is an infinite variation on the Western theme in the inclement Australian lands, always seen through the filter of the Aboriginal experience: an indigenous culture and civilization forced to assimilate to the white man who came from afar and was determined to exploit both the land and the Australian population. It's a shame for Barbera, who offered space and visibility to the director with never-successful films, that he missed by far the best work directed by Warwick Thornton in at least the last twenty years. Given that the premises and the development are so similar, it is also difficult to understand why Wolfram is so successful compared to its predecessors: Sweet Country, as mentioned, but also the subsequent The New Boy (with Cate Blanchett as a nun dealing with an Aboriginal child to convert, screened instead in Cannes).

Perhaps it's a matter of serendipity, because from the outset, it's clear that everything is going right in the film. Focused largely (but not exclusively) on the story of the two young protagonists, Wolfram starts from the mines where they work to show us how they ended up there: torn from their mother and father, the two children are then separated by a violent altercation between white men. One of them, guided by the mule "Mr. Donkey," will set out to track the other, while the mother and father will scour nearby towns, and a series of shady white figures with their showdowns will bring the destinies of the two boys back together. The young point of view transforms Wolfram into an adventure where the sense of danger often gives way to the wonder of the two protagonists, who remain children despite the distortions they witness.

The themes remain those always present in Warwick Thornton's cinema, an Aboriginal director with deep ties to the Kaytetye people who tells the story of his people's resistance to the homogenization of Caucasian culture. The Aboriginal protagonists of Wolfram speak little, but they communicate very effectively through gestures, allusive glances, small objects carefully scattered in the natural landscape, such as the talismans the mother creates with her own hair to signal to her children that she is looking for them and to map the already explored territory. By the end of the film, we will discover how much and what these characters are truly protecting, hiding it from the white men's ambitions. Although intelligent and hardened by the hardships already experienced, the two protagonists are still children, providing a nice moral and tonal counterpoint to the duo of villains, who instead seem to have stepped out of the most classic Western film.

Erroll Shand and Joe Bird indeed play two down-and-out white criminals who are disliked even by other white people, capable of uniting even the usual patrons of the local saloon. Two cowboys between whom there is a strange, almost filial tension: Wolfram is the kind of film where true parents search for their children, while the young protagonists come to terms with difficult relationships with subordinate and substitute figures for their own parents. All around is a flourishing of robberies, shootouts, and allusive dialogues divided between the mine, the saloon, long stretches on horseback (or with a stubborn mule), and dialogues interspersed with spitting and gunshots, to the delight of those who love old-fashioned Westerns.

What makes the difference compared to Sweet Country, which was quite tedious, is the liveliness of the young protagonists, their point of view capable of understanding only up to a certain point what is happening. The previous film, on the other hand, for a long stretch had the gaze and experience of an elderly Aboriginal man who was overly aware of his new place in white society. There is a character in this film who recalls the protagonist of the previous one, who faces the same kind of cruelty, but it is little more than a passage in a long story of solidarity among Aboriginal people to resist more or less silently the abuses of white people, waiting for the right opportunity to escape, make their voices heard, or get revenge, perhaps with interest.

The story is so engaging for the director himself that all that corollary of visual storytelling of the beautiful but inclement Australian territory of the 1930s is minimized. The Berlinale programming and chance then dictated that the film be screened a few hours after The Weight, with which it shares a great deal in terms of atmosphere, genres, and narration. Like in the film with Ethan Hawke, we find ourselves facing men and women forced to confront extraordinarily dangerous circumstances to reunite with their families in the difficult years of the Great Depression, immersed in a nature that is often treacherous. Unlike the American film (an impressive debut), Wolfram is the proof of a mature director, who has tried and re-tried in different stories the images and scenes that we find here and that are unavoidable in his cinema. He too, however, seems to have arrived at a new beginning, or at least seems to have just emerged from some kind of revelation.

Where in the past the close-ups of the large eyes of the child protagonists of his films and their tender, childlike way of reacting to very dramatic and very "adult" events had seemed even cloying, here they are the emotional cornerstone on which the ending is built, which perhaps gets a little lost on the way to the conclusion, but not enough to condemn Wolfram to the disappointment of previous films.