In 'The True History of the Kelly Gang,' director Justin Kurzel's fourth and best feature, George MacKay stars as 19th-century Australian bushranger Ned Kelly.
At the beginning of “True History of the Kelly Gang,” the young Ned Kelly peers into a hut through a window and spies his mother, a prostitute, servicing one of her regular johns. Near the end of the movie, and of his own short, storied life, the fully grown Kelly stares out through the slit in his tank-like iron helmet, watching the advancing soldiers who will soon bring him to a kind of justice.
But these are fugitive intimacies, and for Ned, there is no real escape from his first and most ferocious love: his mother, Ellen , who confers on him a singularly cruel destiny. “My Ned loves me,” she murmurs, a declaration of ownership that the extraordinary Davis infuses with pride, contempt and a flicker of near-Oedipal lust.
Screenwriter Shaun Gray frames the story around a series of letters Ned is seen scribbling by firelight, recounting his life and justifying his actions to his unseen child. That Kelly is not known to have fathered any children is one of many clues that “True History” might be a misnomer.Like most good dramatists, Kurzel and Grant seem less concerned with strict factual accuracy than with psychological plausibility.
But Ned’s apprenticeship does not go well, and Harry’s influence leaves its own ugly scars. The remarkable young Schwerdt, with his blond locks and haunted eyes, makes a beautiful vision of corrupted innocence. Ned seethes at his mother, who betrayed him by selling him off to Harry, but he also inherits her bitter struggle against their British oppressors.
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