Reeling Backward: The Last Wave (1977)
Peter Weir's follow-up to his breakout film is a meandering rumination on the clash of Australian colonial and Aboriginal cultures -- equal parts thriller, white guilt parable and murky mysticism.
Peter Weir has long been one of my favorite movie directors. A central figure in the Australian New Wave of the 1970s, he moved on to Hollywood and put together one of the most illustrious filmographies of the next few decades — “Witness,” “Master and Commander,” “The Truman Show,” “Dead Poets Society,” “Fearless.”
He’s probably the current holder of the unfortunate title of greatest living filmmaker never to win an Oscar (with six nominations).
I discovered him with his last two Aussie films, “Gallipoli” and “The Year of Living Dangerously,” both starring Mel Gibson. Weir was one of those rare directors who could marry poetic, even surreal cinematic experiences with solid storytelling and well-grounded characters.
(No Terrence Malick-esque jaunts into distracting, excruciating “contextual” footage here.)
But the truth is I’m not terribly familiar with his earlier work. I only discovered his breakout film, 1975’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” fairly recently in my movie life. I decided to check out his next work, “The Last Wave” from 1977, and came away frustrated and disappointed.
Ostensibly a psychological thriller, it trudges through a swamp of white guilt and murky mysticism, with the purity of the native people confounding the sensibilities of the colonizers who can never hope to truly understand the deep connection the Aborigines have with the land stolen from them.
It stars Richard Chamberlain as a lawyer (though not a native Australian) who is assigned to defend four Aborigines accused of murdering one of their own in a drunken melee in Sydney. A mild-mannered tax specialist, David Burton has no experience with criminal defense but accepts the assignment through the legal aid service out of a sense of obligation to defend indigenous folks who were pushed out by white people who look like him.
Over and over again, it is emphasized by the white lawyers and judges that the Aborigines are “not tribal” — meaning they are city dwellers who long abandoned their traditional ways and faith. This is important in the context the accused are subject to their laws rather than the tribal ones only still practiced in remote corners of the continent.
I’ll give you one guess if they do in fact turn out to be tribal.
In fact, the story — Weir wrote the screenplay with Tony Morphett and Petru Popescu — gives this away at the very beginning, when old shaman Charlie (Nandjiwarra Amagula) directs a pointing bone at Billy Corman (Athol Compton), stopping his heart dead in his tracks despite being a healthy young man. The other men had been chasing him because Billy stole some carved stones that, in addition to being sacred, would reveal their true nature if revealed to outsiders.
It’s never a good idea for the main character to spend the whole course of a film trying to discover what the audience learned in the first few minutes of it. This sets up a natural impatience for the plot to catch up with the viewer, or as I like to call it, “waiting for the movie to arrive.”
David becomes intrigued by the leader of the accused, Chris Lee, played by David Gulpilil, who became an international figure with 1971’s “Walkabout,” another Australian New Wave piece. Chris is very much the inscrutable Other in this relationship, with David as the sympathetic white questing to understand the truth about him, and thereby exonerate him.
David is rich and married, raised by a minister stepfather (Fred Parslow) after his mother died while he was very young. He was born in South America, or as the Aborigines refer to it, “from the sunrise.” (East as opposed to west.) This is perhaps a cover for the casting of Chamberlain over an Australian actor.
His wife, Annie (Olivia Hamnett), only gets to do stereotypical wife-y things, such as become terrified when Charlie starts stalking their house, or estranged when David begins to plow more and more of his attention into the case.
David’s work is less lawyerly in nature than a personal exploration of the tribal mythology. In fact, in trying to insert himself into this puzzle — Charlie puts him into a trance by repeating the question, “Who are you?” repeatedly — David starts to believe he’s actually part of it.
Specifically, that he is a mulkurul, or prophesying spirit that sometimes takes human form, appearing on the cusp of some apocalyptic event to give warning. David’s dreams becoming increasingly disturbing and prescient, such as seeing Chris holding one of the stolen stones before even meeting him in person.
“Dream is a shadow of something real,” Chris explains.
Certainly the weather seems to be indicating some very bad things to come. Early on in the remote town of Milawee, a long drought is suddenly pierced by a raging storm, despite there being not a cloud in the sky, followed by baseball-sized hail.
The rains soon come to Sydney, and indeed the rest of the movie takes place in a virtual nonstop monsoon. There are even spells of sooty “black rain” — dismissed by the experts as the result of pollution — and frogs falling from the sky.
Things get increasingly loopy as the movie goes on, with David eventually being led by Chris to a series of secret caves under the city protected by the Aborigines, filled with prophetic paintings, the skeleton of a medieval knight and other trinkets. David comes across a mask of a face that appears to be his own, suggesting his spirit is eternal and intertwined with the native religion.
David appears to kill Charlie after he is discovered in the ‘cave of wonders’ — though it’s left rather ambiguous, with Charlie’s bloody hand unclenching to reveal one of the sacred stones. He finally emerges onto the beach to observe the titular wave come to consume them all — though it could be just another iteration of his fevered dream-state. The wave is depicted in a very oblique way; either that or it’s the worst special effect in film history.
I just couldn’t get into the movie on any kind of emotional level. Chamberlain is rather inert and androgynous as David, defined more by his questions than any native character traits.
Like all Weir efforts it is a good-looking movie, with longtime cinematography collaborator Russell Boyd lending a slightly distorted, unfocused look. (Boyd would go on to win an Academy Award for “Master and Commander.”)
There’s also a healthy amount of surrealistic imagery, much of it in some way tied to water: an overflowing bathtub turning David’s household stairs into a waterfall, or rain pouring out of his car radio.
I’ll always remain devoted to Peter Weir for his many amazing films — but this one’s all wet.