His first feature since 2017’s Sweet Country, Warwick Thornton’s Wolfram shares a fictional universe with that acclaimed “kangaroo western.” This loose sequel is another brooding tale of tensions between Aboriginal Australians and the white settler population, in the harsh outback environment of the country’s Northern Territories.
Set in 1932, four years after the events of Sweet Country, Wolfram focuses on two of that film’s minor characters: station owner Mick Kennedy (Thomas M. Wright) and his 18-year-old half-Aboriginal son, Philomac (Pedrea Jackson). After their bond is tested by the arrival of Casey (Errol Shand), an outlaw claiming to be Mick’s relative, Philomac resolves to help Aboriginal youngsters Max (Hazel Jackson) and Kid (Eli Hart) find their mother, Pansy (Deborah Mailman), who reluctantly left them behind in hopes of finding freedom in far-off Queensland.
Aside from a few off-kilter flashbacks, Wolfram’s action proceeds in a notably straightforward, if sluggish, fashion. It doesn’t really pick up momentum until almost an hour in, shortly after Max and Kid escape their servitude at one of their remote town’s many wolfram (or tungsten) mines. Title cards also split the story into four parts, as indicated by on-screen text, but it’s less episodic than unfocused, meandering without purpose between its disparate characters.
As Wolfram’s frequent circling back to re-establish Casey’s antagonistic, hateful attitude and to explore Mick and Philomac’s strained relationship ends up revealing little of interest, it’s hard not to wonder if that time might have been better spent with Pansy, who remains an oddly irrelevant cipher. Her narrative function here, besides yearning stoically, is primarily to leave remnants of her hair and clothing around the arid landscape as waypoints for her children to retrace her steps. This is a slightly implausible minor plot device that might have been more effective had the film’s aforementioned impressionistic aspect been developed more.
Thornton, who did his own cinematography, creates striking images of rugged beauty, but a flat, over-lit sheen and his fondness for lens flares tends to soft-peddle the environment’s grime and unrelenting heat. Ultimately, though, it’s Wolfram’s efforts to stage a genuine reckoning with Australia’s colonial past, particularly the widespread violence and use of Aboriginal “stolen children” as labor, that makes its structural and aesthetic flaws more egregious. It approaches this heavy subject matter often, but consistently flinches from the darkness, either by shifting perspective needlessly or else by relying on the comforts of formal convention.
The script does present some intriguing moral complexity every so often, particularly in the character of Mick, a befuddled, occasionally hesitant participant in the era’s white supremacist culture. In a telling and ultimately pivotal scene, he reacts to a local Aboriginal man’s theft of his livestock less with righteous fury than disbelief at the man’s own carelessness, pointing out that he’s now obliged to report him to authorities likely to be much less forgiving than he is of the crime. Lacking the courage to follow through on his misgivings about the town’s treatment of “blackfellas,” Mick proves an easy mark for the virulently racist Casey, a more one-dimensional character, albeit one whose villainy is portrayed believably by Shand.
Mick’s passive compliance with oppression also finds an interesting parallel in a brief moment where young Max berates a pony, using language that he’s apparently copied from miners and other landowners asserting their dominance over him and the rest of the local laborers. That this neat illustration of inherited power structures and cycles of abuse is played for laughs further demonstrates the unproductive tension between the film’s revisionism and its crowd-pleasing tendencies, a clash that’s most evident in a climactic reveal that one Asian character possesses some impressive martial arts abilities. Which is to say that, while Wolfram might struggle to convey a depth of feeling for its characters and the brutal, dehumanizing frontier they call home, it can be an intermittently satisfying good-versus-evil period piece.
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