Review of Breaker Morant (1980) by Harry W — 19 Jul 2013

Breaker Morant, considered to be one of the finest Australian films of all time, is quite clearly a film deserving of its acclaim.

Like Gallipoli, it conveys the side to which Australia suffered in War being used as scapegoats. Although the context is significantly different, much of the meaning is still the same.

The medium used is courtroom drama, and in the simple small setting of a basic courtroom, Breaker Morant tells a complicated story with words instead of bullets.

Breaker Morant exposes the dramatic underside of the war that comes into court, and uses hypocritical scapegoating from the higher power as a front to tell an alternate version of a story chronicling loss of innocence at the hands of authoritarian control. And it's mostly a technical success due to fine cinemtography, good music and proper editing.

It's Bruce Beresford's fine direction and script handling which ensures that Breaker Morant is a story worth telling and is told as best as possible.

Edward Woodward was great in the title role as he was brisk and confident, and Bryan Brown and Ray Meagher supplied sufficient supporting roles. Plus, Lewis Fitz-Gerald did an excellent job portraying a character with such innocence which gets taken away from him, and so his performance reaches the high expectations of a character of his calibre from such a complex story, and he proves terrific.

It's minor errors are that the story isn't told perfectly at the start since it took me a while to comprehend what the story was trying to tell, as well as some poor lighting which made rendering the visual quality a struggle at moments.

But essentially, Breaker Morant is a classic Australian film which tells its complex war drama in a courtroom medium, and the fact that its a true story just makes it all the more brutal.