The New Boy
Cate Blanchett is a tortured nun trying to protect an Indigenous boy in WWII era Australia, but the lad's spiritual truth doesn't align with her religious zeal in this allegorical rumination.
“The New Boy” is a look at Australia’s practice of trying to “breed out the black” of Indigenous aka Aboriginal orphans for much of the 20th century, and specifically the Catholic Church’s complicity in that lamentable practice. They actually thought they were doing good — giving themselves titles like Chief Protectors of Aborigines — but as practiced it was pretty much cultural erasure writ large.
We’ve seen movies like this before — 2002’s “Rabbit-Proof Fence” comes to mind — but this one from writer/director Warwick Thornton (“Sweet Country”) is less a straightforward drama than an allegorical spiritual tale.
Cate Blanchett plays a committed nun, Sister Eileen, running a small orphanage for boys in the middle of a dusty nowhere during the days of World War II. One day a lost Indigenous boy is captured and dropped off into her lap, and the two begin a long and complicated dance between their faiths.
At first, I was a little put off by the supernatural elements of the tale. It’s become old, tired hat in movies that colonialist whites are the soulless exploiters and whatever darker-skinned natives are authentically connected to nature, or the Earth mother, the old gods or whatever belief system they’re working from.
Turning the boy into a literal magic-maker, conjuring a sparkly fairy of sorts from his fingertips, was the next natural step in that jaded storytelling evolution, I figured.
But the movie gets darker and more interesting as it goes along, asking uncomfortable questions about the nature of faith and our (in)ability to reconcile differing ones. It’s certainly not a fast-paced picture filled with a dense plot, and more existential rumination.
Sister Eileen (Blanchett) is certainly no saint herself. She helps herself prodigiously to the sacrificial wine, occasionally even passing out over her scriptures. There apparently was also once a priest assigned to the orphanage, Dom Peter, but he died or lit off a long time ago and Eileen has been passing herself off as him in her correspondence with the outside world to keep it from being closed down.
She even performs baptisms and other rites she knows are not “nun things,” but reconciles in her confessions — conveniently also administered by herself — that God would want her to do her best by these boys with what she has.
New Boy (Aswan Reid), never named, is about eight years old and completely untouched by the ‘civilized’ world. There’s nothing really keeping him at the orphanage — the doors are not locked and the boys are not constantly supervised — but he seems intrigued by the place and Sister Eileen.
The rest of the orphan boys are initially intrigued by him, then grow bored, and he kind of begins to blend into the background scenery. Eileen includes New Boy in the various chores they are made to do, but he usually quickly loses interest and wanders off on his own, and no one much seems to care.
The only other adult at the place is Sister Mum, a quiet motherly figure who mostly keeps to her assigned domain of the kitchen, usually going about with flour dust on her frock. George (Wayne Blair), the handyman who lives nearby and often helps out, is one of the early examples of such “reformed” Aboriginals, and takes a special, scowling interest in New Boy.
Most of the other orphans are some mix of Indigenous and white, and Eileen just wants to give them enough of an education to have a chance of making it on their own when the grow up. These days with the war on, her boys are being taken away at age 13 to do manual labor at farms and factories.
Reid as New Boy is a mesmerizing presence, an innocent soul who looks upon everything with curiosity, but no judgment. He soon shucks off the clothes he’s given, going about shirtless and unshod, his wild sun-burnt blond hair giving him an angelic halo.
Eileen is stern but kindly, and she and New Boy develop something like mutual admiration. Things grow more complicated when a long-awaited wooden crucifix is delivered for their church, and the lad becomes fixated on assimilating this relic of a newer religion with his much older faith framework.
This will bring in more supernatural occurrences that could be described as horror-adjacent, and growing conflict with Eileen. I’ll leave it there.
This movie isn’t going to be for everyone. For a good while into it, I thought I was going to be one of those on the outside. It’s not the sort of film that invites you in and seduces you. It’s more observational and spare. It takes a while to get there, but its humanistic rewards are worth the journey.
“The New Boy” is currently in limited theatrical release, but you’ll have a better chance catching on demand on all the usual streaming platforms starting Friday, May 30.