Brass vs. Grunt

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

BREAKER MORANT

Directed by Bruce Beresford

Screenplay by Bruce Beresford, Jonathan Hardy and David Stevens

At the sad, debilitating end of the Boer War, three Australian soldiers are brought to court-martial. The charge: murdering some Boer "civilians" they have captured in a vengeful raid, along with a German missionary whose death has provoked a murmur of international reproach. The soldiers' commander, Lord Kitchener, wants to make an example of them so as to disarm world opinion about his unedifying conduct of a nasty war.

Breaker Morant persuasively posits a parallel between this century's first large-scale colonial conflict (the Boer War) and its most recent (Viet Nam). It derives from that analogy an immediacy that one does not often find in films set in the dimming past. But there is a larger success: this very traditional-looking film is dramatically taut, full of strongly developed characters who never deteriorate into good-guy, bad-guy spokesmanship. There is no doubt that the soldiers committed the crimes with which they are charged. But their defense attorney (well played by Jack Thompson) argues that it is both a miscarriage of justice and an act of hypocrisy to single out these men for crimes no different from those committed by half the British Expeditionary Force--and, the film implies, by soldiers on half the battlefields and paddyfields since.

At heart, Breaker Morant is a courtroom drama: its basis is a play that was, in turn, based on a historical incident. There are well-staged flashbacks that grant the film a life and movement outside its judicial chamber. But there is plenty inside too, thanks in particular to Edward Woodward's fine, full-throated performance in the title role. Breaker is a hard man with a broad romantic streak.

Soldier, poet and singer, with a whimsically ironic acceptance of his fate, Breaker approaches the dimensions of a Renaissance grunt. If the film that bears his name is perhaps a bit too much cut on the square, if its technique does not quite match its fine eye for moral distinctions, it is nonetheless another distinctive achievement from the fast-rising Australian film industry. --By Richard Schickel

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