The way he writes about the characters makes you feel connected to them. Thiele makes me think that Storm Boy is real and that I’ve seen him before: he is that believable.
He raises them to become big adult pelicans. The story starts when some hunters shoot some wild pelicans and Storm Boy finds an abandoned nest of three baby pelicans. He pulls me in because I live near Goolwa and I know the Coorong and this part of the Murray River. His home was the long, long snout of sandhills and scrub that curves away south-eastwards.”Ĭolin Thiele depicts this landscape perfectly. But in the new film, by literally creating a bust of the bird – as if a clump of stone or plaster could compare with the natural majesty of wings and feathers – the meaning has been accidentally inverted: a story about how something can never die becomes about how it will never live again.This story is about a young boy called Storm Boy, and his pelican friends: “Storm Boy lived between the Coorong and the sea. Safran’s film looked up to the skies, evoking the wonderful flying creature as a symbol of eternal beauty, its wings flapping in hearts and minds as much as in the universe. Suffice to say that Seet doesn’t get the balance right, creating an experience more depressing than optimistic. Without revealing how the film’s conclusion unfolds, the moral question at the core of it (a simple one, about business versus conservation) is placed in the “too hard” basket, with one key character abdicating themself of moral responsibility by handballing an important decision to somebody else.īut the biggest downer involves the fate of one of the principal characters, which will not be disclosed here. Photograph: Matt Nettheim/Stormy Productions Trevor Jamieson as Fingerbone Bill, with Finn Little as Mike ‘Storm Boy’ Kingley. The protagonist receives friendship and spiritual counsel from local Indigenous man Fingerbone Bill (the naturally charismatic Trevor Jamieson). This beloved character – a fixture of our national cinema and literature – is a gregarious human-loving bird, preferring to point his long schnoz in the direction of people rather than the water. We observe his young self fostering motherless baby pelicans, one of whom becomes the family pet, Mr Percival. But, as the grown-up Kingley explains to his granddaughter, the conversations between them forming a bedtime story framing device, “one day the world came to me.” That past involves Kingley as a child (the fresh-faced Finn Little, who has great presence) living on Ninety Mile beach with his father Tom (Jai Courtney, delivering a fine performance as a reserved but not unemotional man).įather and son are cut off off from the world. Seet and the cinematographer Bruce Young (who recently shot the excellent Blue Murder: Killer Cop and the laughable Bite Club) indulge in fish-eye style compositions, with blurry edges that evoke a dreamy past.
It is a strikingly surreal opener, with a rich cinematic texture that comes and goes throughout the rest of the film. The room’s floor-to-ceiling glass window shatters and everybody exits except for Kingley, who, as if in trance, walks towards it, noticing a pelican outside perched on a light post. There are intense grey clouds, rumblings of thunder and heavy rain. In a meeting room high up in the building, Kingley observes a grey and foreboding metropolis – starkly contrasting the glistening aqua water and silky sand dunes of Coorong, South Australia, where much of the film is based. Morgana Davies and Geoffrey Rush in a scene from Storm Boy.
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