A new film pries Ned Kelly loose from the myths around him, giving the Australian outlaw an origin story — which unfolds as a dark tale studded with the pathos of a frightened boy forced into manhood far too early.
, but there's an irreducibly sweet goofiness that serves him beautifully as Ned, an innocent warped into avenging angel by early trauma, destitution, and the brutal injuries of the colonial rule he was born into.
Played as a child by a seraphic Orlando Schwerdt, Ned is shaped early on by the loss of his father and the twisted devotion of his mother, played by the terrific Australian actress Essie Davis, recently seen as a harried single mother in. Davis's Ellen Kelly may be the most bracing portrait of maternal devotion gone bananas on the screen today. A proud, wild-haired warrior, Ellen Kelly will do anything, including selling her body and her favorite son, to protect the little that's hers.
A hyper-responsible little man of the house, Ned adores his mother back, and their mad kinship will remain the movie's fulcrum, molding the eager-to-please lad into an adult who's equal parts creative writer and bitter avenger. In the latter he's helped along by bush ranger Harry Power , whose sexual impotence feeds straight into a horrifying sadism that lands his young charge in prison.
And so Ned's story comes to an end, his account always refracted for us by the film's visceral interpretation.Gang ends with a set piece that both tops and undercuts every bravura climactic gunfight you may have seen. The spectacle, at once brutal and absurd , affirms and demolishes Ned's messenger-of-God fantasies and those of the Western too. Behind his dangling body we hear echoes of an earlier comment by a buddy with a clearer head.
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