Chopper: rewatching classic Australian films

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/dec/06/chopper-rewatching-classic-australian-films

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In his own macabre way, Mark “Chopper” Read was a show pony until the end. In his final television appearance, recorded for 60 Minutes two weeks before he died in October from liver cancer, Australia’s most notorious celebrity criminal boasted about murdering four people. He was never convicted of any.

When his interviewer, weary of Chopper’s reputation as a self-professed advocate for never letting the truth get in the way of a good story, reminded him of his penchant for telling tall tales, the 58-year-old responded: “Yeah, of course, right, but I’m telling the truth now.” He went on to discuss his alleged murders in bizarre, punch-drunk detail.

The interview plays like a scene straight from New Zealand-born director Andrew Dominik’s terrific 2000 drama Chopper.

In Dominik’s stylish character study, the recipients of Chopper’s stories interpret them with outright disbelief. “Mate you’re a bullshit artist, simple,” says one police officer after the famously loquacious crim, played by Eric Bana, confesses to one of the murders his real-life counterpart bragged about shortly before his death.

That one can so easily imagine the 60 Minutes scene unfolding in Dominik’s narrative is a testament to how well the film builds an authentic sense of character. Given Hollywood’s notorious track record in stretching the truth, Chopper’s introduction as “a dramatisation in which narrative liberties have been taken” seems generous. The greatest strength of Dominik’s film is not its ability to accurately recreate real-life events, but its use of fiction.

The manner with which Dominik fuses facts and myths about Chopper’s life is one reason the film so effectively represents its subject and connected so well with audiences. The director doesn’t shy from the brutality of his protagonist's day-to-day existence. Chopper stabs an inmate, gets stabbed by an inmate, shoots multiple people, assaults women and dominates every scene with a menacing air of unpredictability. But nor does Dominik accept that this rough-as-guts thug is much more than a hothead looking for fame and obtaining it using cruelty and lies.

A more conventional film would have mapped out Chopper’s life as a series of crimes and confrontations. Instead, from the first scene <strong>–</strong> Chopper watches himself on TV in his prison room, mesmerised by his own performance – the film is established in part as an exploration of one man’s foul quest for celebrity.

Chopper is the kind of person one would describe as “inimitable” if Bana hadn’t imitated him to near perfection. Compare Bana to documentary footage and you get a sense of how on-mark his performance was. Bana commands every scene with such steaming chutzpah, such bat-out-of-hell confidence, watching him spit bogan vitriol and chew up the scenery feels almost intimidating. It’s a performance in the same league as Geoffrey Rush’s unforgettable impersonation of pianist David Helfgott in 1996's Shine.

It was so good, in fact, it made Bana's otherwise decent subsequent career look thoroughly mediocre. Chopper established an early high-water mark the actor has never come close to matching.

“The career of Eric Bana is the biggest mystery and the biggest disappointment of my professional lifetime,” wrote Peter Bradshaw in 2009. “What happened? The last 10 years should have been a decade-long festival of Bana winning Oscars for thrilling, complex roles.”

It wasn’t to be. The brilliance of Bana’s performance in Chopper – worth revisiting if only as a reminder of what he is capable of – now feels worlds away from the star's middle-of-the-road oeuvre.

The same disappointment cannot be attributed to Dominik, who went on to direct two first-rate American crime films: 2007’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (every bit as long and sprawling as its title) and 2012’s Killing Them Softly, which uses gangster tropes as metaphors for the dangers of unregulated economies.

All three of Dominik’s films explore myths. Killing Them Softly is essentially a western with vehicles and leather jackets instead of horses and cowboy boots; the myth of the old American frontier as a place of valour and heroism is laid out to dry. The Assassination of Jesse James is about substituting legends for real people.

Chopper took a different tack. It is as much about building myths as it is dismantling them. Like the life of its subject, this magnificent film seems to exist in a middle ground between fiction and fact.

<em>• You can rewatch Chopper on Saturday 7 December, 9.30pm on SBS One, the first in a four-part season of critically acclaimed Australian films playing every weekend in December.</em>

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