Have
you ever seen a goldmine become a goldmine? It’s a rapid and violent
process, in which the chaotic rumble of exploding dynamite tries to match the
machine precision of an automotive assembly line. But this precision is a false
form of comfort meant to lull the gold-greedy into complacency while nature
returns to bite them for daring to steal the shiniest part of itself. Nature
leaves clues while the explosions cut across enormous quarries, as rocks spray
like oversized bullets in every direction to warn the humans who dare to
consider themselves so clever that they can tame nature. It’s coming for them
and there’s nothing they can do to stop it.
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| Photo Credit: Goldstone/IMDb |
So
when the aged madame at the local brothel in Ivan Sen’s Australian noir
thriller Goldstone tells a young prostitute, “The world was not made for
you, you were made for it,” you can tell she means it because she’s learned to
accept the horrifying idea that the world—and this place in the harsh
Australian bush—does not care one bit about who she is, what she thinks, how
she feels. It ruins her, and, she makes clear to her young charge, it’ll do the
same to her and anyone who comes after her, too.
That
particular brand of cruelty is all over the town that gives Goldstone its
title. It’s is a grubby place, little more than a few rusty shacks and trailers
spread out over vast swaths of the Australian countryside. It’s populated by a
white-owned gold mining company and the Aboriginal people who once lived on the
land that the miners and the moneyed interests that back them once took. While
the powerful residents of Goldstone spend their time sowing discontent over
racial resentments (this is a place where no white person can be bothered to
call an Aboriginal person anything other than “black fella”) and violence (it’s
a hub for human trafficking and sex slavery for young women from Asian
countries), the natural world is rising up to reclaim itself. Mud and dust
crawl ever higher up the exterior walls of these corrupt folks’ homes and no
piece of metal is left without rust. It’s a grimy, forgotten hole of a place.
If
you squint, you could say that the only clean part of Goldstone is its chief of
police, Josh Waters (Alex Russell), who may buy prostitutes on the regular
without asking them whether they’re in town against their will, but at least
he’s not taking bribes from the mining company so he can sleep at night (or so
he tells himself). He’s at least less sweaty and grungy than Jay Swan (Aaron
Pedersen), the drunken detective sent by the feds to investigate a missing
persons case that ties into a web of corruption that encompasses Goldstone’s
city hall, the Asian prostitution ring, and the mining company with a
suspiciously robust security force guarding it.
Production
designer Matthew Putland creates a grueling, spent world, a place that you’d
mourn if it weren’t filled with such disgusting fiends. Thanks to Putland’s
bleak and austere work, Goldstone, the town, doesn’t feel simply lived in—it
feels long dead. Sen, working as his own cinematographer (he also wrote the
script and score in a feat of multitasking you don’t typically see in films
these days), shoots Putland’s designs much like an especially anguished episode
of Breaking Bad, all extreme wide shots of people conversing against the
backdrop of tan sand and rocks. They are small, like ants, and their concerns
even smaller, as the environment encroaches them, ready to strip them of their
fleshy, gooey bits so they can become just some more dust.
From Dynamite To Dud
Teaming
this lyrical and mournful aesthetic with the trappings of neo-noir would seem
to be a slam dunk along the lines of Hell or High Water, but Goldstone
stops excelling with its aching pictures of a sun-charred countryside. The
movie certainly scratches the itch for crusty backcountry crime flicks, with
odd, humorous flourishes likely influenced by the Coen brothers and crime
novelist Elmore Leonard. There’s a prostitute who roves the countryside in a
neon-decorated trailer with a doorbell on it and Goldstone’s mayor, played by
veteran character actor Jacki Weaver, has a framed photo of herself on her desk
dressed like a barrister attending a high school prom. But the film crumbles
thanks to its script, which fails the haunting images at every turn—sometimes
multitasking isn’t the greatest idea. Overly on-the-nose lines like, “Truth can
be hard to find around here, especially once the sun goes down,” clog up
cinematic space and choke the life out of the movie. Only Weaver is capable of
delivering such drivel with anything approaching believability or gravitas—the
other actors are best served by keeping their mouths shut.
The
first draft feel of the script carries far beyond the dialogue. Sen brings
nothing new to Jay’s backstory, which has every “drunk, fallen hero with a dead
family” trope in the book and the plot of discovering the human
trafficking-prostitution ring feels like a bad case-of-the-week episode of Justified
(or, if you’re feeling less charitable, on par with a case-of-the-week
episode of Walker, Texas Ranger). Goldstone never met a twist it
wouldn’t spoil long ahead of its arrival, and every “reveal” is obvious from
the word go. Nothing is a surprise, which is poison to a noir-mystery story.
But
every once in a while, gloriously and mercifully, Sen has his characters shut
up so he can focus on what’s most pressing: destruction. When the inevitable
shootout occurs, the only noises on the soundtrack are heavy, panicked
breathing and bullets cracking the sound barrier. The smoke from gun barrels
twist skyward to commingle with the dust and debris of the desert. The humans’
pain and their raw, recently deceased carcasses are left behind. They’re done.
The desert can reassert itself. It’s won.
Director:
Ivan Sen
Writer:
Ivan Sen
Starring:
Aaron Pedersen, Alex Russell, Jacki Weaver, David Wenham, David Gulpilil,
Pei-Pei Cheng, Michelle Lim Davidson
Available
in limited release
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