Richard Chamberlain shines in this dark fable of privilege and injustice.
“We’ve lost our dreams. Then they come back and we don’t know what they mean.”
This line, spoken by the recently departed Richard Chamberlain playing David Burton, is at the heart of what Weir is up to in The Last Wave, his third feature film and in many ways his most challenging one yet. Dreams play a big part into the plot of The Last Wave, both literal and figurative, and specifically the idea of that dreams exist somewhere between perceived reality and that which is unknown. But what happens when those dreams are punctured, transforming into nightmares? What happens when the carefully crafted world you have established around you suddenly seems to be falling apart?
Weir being Weir, this narrative plays out against the individual. Quite literally one person’s (Burton’s) dream splinters apart, and his whole life becomes a dark shadow of itself. But it is impossible to talk about The Last Wave without digging deeper into the larger scale narrative Weir is exploring. Yes this is the story of, as Weir himself put it, “someone with a very pragmatic approach to life” finding his reality being deconstructed. But it is also a story about Australians, specifically white Australians, having to confront the nature of their very nation.
Let me get this out of the way here: while all of Weir’s films up to this point have touched upon Australian national identity as a subtext, The Last Wave puts it front and center. Specifically it is a film that explores the nature of white Australian citizens’ relationship with Aboriginal tribes. This creates a slight barrier between American viewers and the original intended Australian audience, but one that is worth exploring if for no other reason to consider commonalities.
David Burton is a tax lawyer who finds himself wrapped up in being drafted to serve as a public defender for five Aboriginal men who have been accused of a grisly murder. This is due to once helping with an Aboriginal land deal, but there is a larger coincidence: Burton has on suffered from frightening, Apocalyptic dreams, some of which include an Aboriginal man. When one of the accused turns out to be the literal man in his dreams, it feels like more than a coincidence that this occurred.
Meanwhile across Sydney, strange meteorological patterns have been occurring. This includes massive rain and hail storms, which causes Burton’s dreams and visions to transfer into grisly scenes of a massive flood. In the midst of all of this, Burton becomes increasingly convinced he may be Mulkurul, a piece of Aboriginal belief that entails people having divine visions of the future.
As you might expect, all these plotlines converge and cross and compound across each other. The Last Wave is dense in themes, mixing conversations about 1970s Australian society and the place Aboriginal citizens play within it with startling doomsday iconography. Cinematographer Russell Boyd, a regular Weir collaborator, expertly shoots these segments, blending dreamlike visuals with realistic grounding to make it unclear what is actually occurring and what is a dream.
A big theme throughout the film is the idea colonialism as a means of modernization. Namely, several people surrounding Burton assure him that the Aboriginals in this case are not part of any sort of “tribal” culture, that they are woven and assimilated into the very fabric of white Australian life. Burton remains uncertain, seeing them as set apart and of a distinctly different culture. The reality of course lies in between these two extremes. There is a balance that Weir is teetering on here, of showing admiration and respect for Aboriginal culture, while also falling into the occasional trap of exoticizing and romanticizing it. For both Weir and Burton there is something tragic in the lost civilization that was flattened by European influence, but that civilization is presented as strange, magical and unknowable.
The inherent tension there is assisted by Chamberlain’s performance. There is a soulfulness to his depiction of Burton, of someone who is struggling with his growing awareness of the pain inherent to the society he lives in, and mournful for the comfort he surrenders. Those in his sphere, especially his wife Annie (Olivia Hamnett), feel like they are losing him as he shows increasing compassion and concern for the Aboriginal men he is defending. What was supposed to be an easy case to convince them to plea guilty to get a minimal sentence turns him attempting to coerce them into saying out loud what has long been buried.
It also helps that Weir went to great lengths to include Aboriginal people in the creation of the film, including several actors and a special collaborator to assure he presented the culture respectfully. The main two actors were David Gulpilil, credit as simply Gulpilil, who plays Chris Lee the dream man who guides Burton deeper down into the storm, and Nanjiwarra Amagula as Charlie, the shaman who attempts to keep Burton at arm’s length. The fact Amagula was an actual tribal shaman gives his performance particular gravity, even as he plays an ostensibly antagonistic character.
Burton is in many ways a trademark of the Weir individual, despite having a guide in the person of Chris. The Individual is a central theme that will show up throughout Weir’s work. But Burton’s rallying cry against the unacceptable shape of the world he resies in is also his own undoing. By confronting the social injustices that led to his own position of leisure and power, he must be confronted with his own previous blindness. Put more contemporarily, Burton must check his privilege, and the price is ultimately his life as he knows it.
Similar to Picnic at Hanging Rock, the final climactic moments of The Last Wave are purposefully vague and open to interpretation. But unlike that film, the uncertainty isn’t at the heart of what the film is attempting to dig into. Rather, it is the burden of knowing. To widen your perception and compassion does come with a price. For Button, that compassion and empathy is felt so deeply that it becomes an obsession, and in seeing and confronting the imbalances his very presence illicit, he realizes that there is no way that this could all end but destruction. But when precisely that destruction came, either in the future or past, remains shrouded in mystery.
Next Week: Weir returns briefly to his grimier roots with The Plumber.
