Cate Blanchett keeps the faith in 'The New Boy'
Australian historical drama looks at the cost of forced assimilation
It’s sometime in the 1940s, and the boy looks like he doesn’t just live in the Australian outback, but as if he has grown out of the parched soil there. An unnamed Aboriginal child of about eight or nine (played magnetically by Aswan Reid), the boy has a shock of blonde hair that almost exactly matches the gently waving auburn grasses around him. When a pair of British soldiers ruthlessly capture him (using a boomerang), it’s as if they’re trying to tame the land itself.
It’s not a subtle metaphor for the brutality of colonial rule, but Warwick Thornton’s “The New Boy” doesn’t traffic in subtlety. Thornton, who is of Indigenous descent, has made a resonant, achingly gorgeous parable about the clash of cultures and the cost of forced assimilation.
The boy is taken to a windswept mission in the middle of nowhere, run by Sister Eileen (Cate Blanchett, in her first role in years in her native Australia). The obvious play would be to make Sister Eileen a cruel and domineering presence, but Eileen is kind and immediately protective of her young charges.
Sister Eileen also has a secret – that the priest, Don Peter, who is supposed to be running the Mission died a year earlier, and she’s hidden the fact from her higher-ups, pretending to be Don Peter in correspondence. Her motives are murky, but we get the sense that keeping the Church at arm’s length is another way of protecting the Aboriginal children at the mission.
But the nun’s kindness is also in service of the larger mission of her church – to forcibly convert the children to Catholicism, erase their Aboriginal heritage from their minds and hearts, and prepare them for a life of servitude, working the farms of white settlers.
The blonde boy firmly resists such assimilation, running shirtless around the church in untamed confidence. He also has some kind of magic abilities, creating little balls of glowing light that dance in the air around him, and are able to heal another boy when he’s bitten by a snake. It’s not surprising that when the boy looks up at the carved wooden Jesus in the church, he sees him not as a god to be worshipped, but as a kindred spirit.
The metaphor isn’t subtle, and “The New Boy” might have been a juicier drama if it had been an overt struggle of wills between Sister Eileen and the boy. Instead, Blanchett underplays the nun, who grows confused and even doubtful of her own faith as she sees the boy’s power. She’s a good person, but what is her goodness for? While it’s Blanchett’s face who looms on the poster, it’s really Reid who holds center stage in the film as the enigmatic, guileless boy.
Thornton is a cinematographer, and the shots of the Australian landscape are stunningly beautiful, matched by a melancholy score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. It’s against this lovely backdrop that “The New Boy” tells a story that’s so tragically familiar.
“The New Boy” is now in theaters in limited release.