Craig Silvey’s 2009 coming-of-age novel, Jasper Jones, has enjoyed a recent renaissance, with Kate Mulvany’s stage adaptation seeing three separate productions in as many years: at Perth’s Barking Gecko in 2014; at Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre earlier this year; now at Melbourne Theatre Company, where it runs until 1 September.
But it was a feature film adaptation that premiered to an enthusiastic home field audience on Wednesday night at the opening of Western Australian film festival CinefestOz, in Busselton.
Set in the fictional town of Corrigan, the film, directed by Rachel Perkins – who previously made Bran Nue Dae – was shot in the WA town of Pemberton with funds from ScreenWest, and is projected for release in early 2017.
With its child’s eye view of small town racial prejudice, publicity for Silvey’s book was quick to label it the Australian To Kill a Mockingbird – but it is hat-tips to Harper Lee’s friend Truman Capote that dominate the film’s opening stretch. Moved to investigate the death of a local girl, 13-year-old protagonist Charlie Bucktin (Levi Miller) picks up In Cold Blood at the library, and minutes later is slipped a copy of Breakfast at Tiffany’s – mysterious note inside – by local Holly Golightly-in-waiting Eliza Wishart (Angourie Rice), the sister of the dead girl.
Charlie finds out about the death over Christmas 1965, when he is summoned from his bed in the dead of night by Indigenous kid and town scapegoat Jasper Jones (Aaron L. McGrath), who has found his white girlfriend hanging from a tree in the woods. Convinced that he’ll be blamed for her death, Jones enlists Charlie to help him hide the body, and to find information on alternative suspects.
As Charlie plays kid detective he begins to see the town with new eyes, and the hypocrisies – both petty and monstrous – of his family and neighbours come into focus.
An ongoing debate about the relative virtues of Batman over Superman between Charlie and his friend Jeffrey Lu (Kevin Long) sets out the stakes of the film in crystal-clear terms: Charlie is headed for a reckoning with the true meaning of heroism.
If that sounds a little schematic, it is, but the story is a good one nonetheless – and that the screenplay, by Silvey and Snowtown’s Shaun Grant, can offer this level of thematic clarity suggests the strong grasp the film-makers have on their subject.
Though Charlie at first seems awfully close to a white saviour figure – he is positioned as consigliore to a troubled black kid, a girl in danger, and Lu, who suffers from the town’s suspicion of Vietnamese migrants – the story has a smart sense of his ability to combat Corrigan’s dark side. By the time Lu announces, right before his triumphant and unlikely performance at a cricket match, that “this town needs a hero”, it’s starting to become obvious that Charlie’s reckoning will be a hard one; that the best he can do is to be a witness and staunch ally to his friends as the iniquities around him churn onward.
The setting is the late 60s, but the atmosphere of bike rides, long nights in the woods, questionable adult supervision and small town secrets (along with its distinctively American literary antecedents – Lee, Capote, even Mark Twain gets a shout out) could well appeal to nostalgic fans of Netflix’s Stranger Things, though the conspiracies here are rather more personal than governmental. Perkins, finding the sweet spot between childish goofiness and adult drama, keeps things fleet, funny, and just the right side of suspenseful; tonally, the film is a match for any Spielbergian 80s coming-of-age classic. She’s aided by the rich wide-screen cinematography of Mark Wareham, and a persuasive score by Antony Partos.
The cast is uniformly good, especially McGrath and Miller, who gives a remarkably sustained lead performance as Charlie – alhough he’s frequently upstaged by scene-stealer Long. As the decrepit old hermit on the edge of town, Hugo Weaving continues his transition into the Grand Old Man of the Australian screen.
But it’s Toni Collette, impossibly vivacious as always, who registers most strongly. As Charlie’s mother – bee-hived, eye-shadowed, and straining at the bonds of a dissatisfying marriage – she switches from tenderness to frustration on a dime. One charming scene has her transforming a mini-tantrum in the kitchen into an opportunity to twist and bop to the radio. Shimmying around in a mustard dress, she almost dances away with the film.
• Jasper Jones will be released in 2017
