The Convert (MA. 119 mins)
4 stars
New Zealand filmmaker Lee Tamahori's 1994 film Once Were Warriors was a scorcher of a film that burned a sad child-sized hole through anyone who watched it and which seeded many successful careers.
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Its lead performer Temuera Morrison, among dozens of international film roles scored on the back of Warriors, would become Bobba Fett, the original cloned to became the Stormtroopers in the Star Wars franchise.
Perhaps even more successful is Warriors support player Cliff Curtis, now a leading man in dozens of Hollywood features including the latest Avatar film.
Lee Tamahori himself as director was plucked by Hollywood after Warriors and directed one of the James Bond films among a handful of other fun and high-profile works, though the time between features has gotten longer and here he is back in his home country.
Tamahori wrote the screenplay for The Convert with Michael Bennett and Shane Danielson, a gory and handsome feature set in the early days of white colonial arrivals in 1830s New Zealand.
Guy Pearce plays a minister, Thomas Munro, arriving from Britain to a small colonial settlement town called Epworth in the Maori-dominated South Pacific islands of Aotearoa.
The white colonists lease the lands their community sits on from the local Maori tribe led by Maianui (Antonio Te Maioha), whose nation is in an ongoing tribal conflict with the peoples led by Akatarawa (Lawrence Makoare).
As an ambitious and aggressive leader, Akatarawa has been successful at expanding the lands controlled by his people, and so the white colonists have selfish reasons for supporting Maianui, and in seeing both sides whittled down through combat.
Thomas Munro has come to the rescue of Maianui's daughter Rangimai (Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne), and so his side in any potential conflict is almost decided for him by the friendship he has formed with her, though Munro has his own demons from past conflicts and he does his best to work with Rangimai to head off conflict.
I find Guy Pearce a fascinating performer. His quiet and masculine performance as Thomas gives the viewer a mostly neutral observer that allows the film's other characters to reveal their hands.
He may have arrived to spread the word of God, a converter of what the colonists refer to as savages, but becomes himself a convert to a moral sensibility that is frustrated by the selfishness of the British who are supplying weapons to all sides and are standing by to muscle in on whatever remains of the fallout.
Tamahori and the writing team don't shy away from the white saviour complex this character represents though, they literally have him riding into the film's opening scenes upon a white horse.
Their screenplay is drawn from the so-called Musket Wars and from Hamish Clayton's novel Wulf, constructing an historical fiction that still has a lot of truths to tell about modern New Zealand's origins.
Aussie Jacqueline McKenzie is also strong as the former Irish convict who acts as Thomas's interpreter - the film is an Australian-Kiwi co-production.
The Maori performers are uniformly strong and their scenes include some intense and epically-staged scenes of well-choreographed movement and violence, and Tamahori gets to really show off his directorial flair as the battle begins.
Cinematographer Gin Loane shoots the gob-smacking New Zealand locations as you would hope for, such blue blues in the oceans and green greens in the hills mercurially presided over by that long white cloud.
Details on costuming, set construction, are all lush, so much wonderful craftsmanship on display.
