Detective Swan returns, bloodied but unbowed – a review of ‘Goldstone’

It was a shock this week to be suddenly precipitated from one of the coldest days so far this year in southern Australia into the hot and dry landscapes of Goldstone, Ivan Sen’s sequel to his highly successful Mystery Road.

These landscapes of Middleton, central west Queensland, where Goldstone was mostly filmed, stretch out hundreds of miles in all directions like a multicoloured carpet unfurling. The viewer feels overwhelmed, seduced and abandoned all at the same time. Interestingly European exploration of the Middleton area began with explorer John McKinlay’s expedition in search of the missing Burke and Wills expedition in 1862 and then somehow was forgotten.
Detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pederson), the hero of Mystery Road returns, arriving in this dry desert town like a cowboy in a Western. But Jay’s hero status has been tarnished. He’s a semi-broken man as he’s breathalysed and thrown into prison by local cop Josh (Alex Russell).
These early scenes, where Swan seems hollowed out by a failed marriage and the death of his daughter, intoxicated and throwing up in his cell, are very difficult to watch.

Sen has never been afraid to portray the real issues behind surface beauty of the landscapes. His first feature Beneath Clouds won him global acclaim, screening at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and winning the Premiere First Movie Award at the 2002 Berlin Film Festival and the 2002 Best Director Award at the Australian Film Institute Awards.

Against a contemporary background of mining and the struggle with Land Rights councils, this film digs deep into corruption of authority and the trafficking of vulnerable girls. Here is a cast of characters prepared to ‘worship the money god’, according to indigenous elder Jimmy, portrayed movingly by David Gulpilil.

The starkly beautiful country of Middleton, which had just a population of three pre-film production, is a town made up of demountables, inserted into this alien landscape like ugly tumours – the bar/brothel, the police station, the mayor’s office, all just temporary interlopers into this ancient landscape. Even the unexpected one-woman brothel known as ‘Pinky’s,’ is just passing through.

Locals want Jay be just passing through too but he’s here to investigate the disappearance of a Chinese bar girl and even though Josh the lone young cop, is at first antagonistic, he’s gradually drawn into the investigation too.

This is a film which moves easily between a long distance and a close-up vision with ease. There are incredible aerial shots which peer voyeuristically down on tiny figures, or the shadow of a single tree. Tiny trucks follow dirt roads, which cut across the dry desert like ancient song lines. This aerial viewer is a curious but dispassionate deity.

The camera moves as easily in close up across the landscapes of faces where emotions flicker then disappear, especially the craggy faces of Jay and Jimmy. The gnarled and wrinkled furrows of David Gulpilil’s face are indeed a thing of beauty.
Goldstone is a many layered film, complex and unsettling. It’s equally a crime thriller, a mythic hero’s journey and a morality tale, maybe even an Aussie Western with its high-octane shoot-out at the climax. Is this ‘outback noir’?

But in the end it’s the characters that drive this story. Aaron Pederson has never been better as the emotionally wounded hero, still managing to stand upright. He’s haggard and under constant tension but determined to pursue justice like the best of heroes.
Jacki Weaver as the town’s forever smiling mayor reprises that sort of role that so terrified us in Animal Kingdom in 2010. According to her own self-description, she’s ‘just an old lady who makes cakes’, not the smiling, scheming cold-hearted manipulator we discover her to be– the Lady Macbeth of the outback. Apple pies have never before looked so threatening.

Alex Russell was a surprise too as Josh, the inexperienced but determined young cop who could easily fall either side of the law. There’s an unexpected depth to him by the end of the film, portraying a pensive man who yearns to be more than he is, who nurtures secret ambitions beyond the limitations of Goldstone.

The question which seems to underline the film is whether individuals can really make any difference in a corruptible world. The brothel madam warns one of her girls that ‘the world is not made for you; you are made for this world so you must just put up with your role. ‘
The mayor’s mantra is similar. ‘The past is past; you can’t go back’ she maintains but of course in this film, as in the real world, the past is never past and the dead are never really dead. Jimmy is proof of that.
The pressure of the past is suggested at the beginning of the film by a selection of old black and white photographs of early European and Chinese settlement and of indigenous people on the mission. This past presses down and influences the present.

In the end, even though Jay appears to be the stranger in town, he’s the one who feels most connected, most at home here, not the white characters who are unsure of themselves and their place here. It’s no exaggeration to say that white Australia still has an enormous amount to learn from indigenous culture and the land in which it is embedded. Ivan Sen’s voice will be one worth paying attention to as part of that continual exploration.