Chopper
Australia 2000
Reviewed by Danny Leigh
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Australia, 1991. From his prison cell, Mark 'Chopper' Read watches himself being interviewed on national television.
1978. In another jail, Read stabs top tough guy Keithy George who later dies from his wounds. George's associates place a contract on Read's head. Read is stabbed repeatedly by his best friend Jimmy Loughnan, but survives. Fearing for his life, he asks to be transferred to another jail. After his request is denied, he gets a fellow inmate to cut off his ears, thereby securing a medical transfer.
1986, Melbourne. On his release from prison, Read, now a minor celebrity, visits his father before reuniting with his girlfriend Tanya. That evening, the couple visit Bojangles nightclub where Read confronts Neville Bartos, a drug dealer he shot 10 years earlier. Convinced Bartos is having an affair with Tanya, he beats up his girlfriend and her mother. Visiting Bartos' home, he shoots his host before reluctantly driving him to hospital. With numerous contracts out on Read's life, Bartos hires Loughnan, now a junkie, to arrange his killing in the carpark of Bojangles. In the resulting fiasco, Read shoots Sammy, Loughnan's patsy. Claiming self-defence, Read is acquitted of murdering Sammy, but is sentenced to five years for shooting Bartos.
1991. Having published a best-selling memoir, Read continues watching his television interview from prison.
Review
The omens do not bode well. A debut feature director, best known for his music videos, introduces his biography of an unrepentant, publicity-seeking thug by confessing via a title card that "liberties have been taken" with the facts of his story. But while this might prime audiences to expect a grisly Antipodean rehash of Guy Ritchie's depressingly influential Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Andrew Dominik's Chopper emerges as something altogether different: a visually arresting and persuasively intelligent project during which Dominik announces himself as a film-maker of some style and potential.
Indeed, if this openly selective account of the life of Mark 'Chopper' Read (much to his own delight, second only to Ned Kelly in his country's pantheon of career criminals) shares common ground with any of the recent rash of British odes to the underworld, it is with Paul McGuigan's fine Gangster No. 1. Just like McGuigan's stringent morality tale, Chopper displays an aesthetic swagger far beyond the MTV gimcracks of Ritchie et al. Even its use of colour signposts the scope of Dominik's direction: deep, viscous reds hang over Read's visit to Bojangles nightclub (where drug dealer Bartos has arranged to have him shot dead); sickly, torpid greens dominate an encounter with junkie Jimmy Loughnan; and, most strikingly of all, drab, enervated blues illuminate our anti-hero's various sojourns in prison.
But if Gangster No. 1 used its dazzling physicality to heighten the grim hyperreality of its narrative, Chopper attempts a far trickier balancing act, infusing proceedings with a mordant humour miraculously free of glib romanticism. Certainly, one would be hard pushed to emerge from the film with any degree of sympathy for its protagonist; yet Dominik also draws a ripe, absurdist wit from his unsavoury misadventures. In one audaciously deadpan prison scene, for instance, Read is stabbed by fellow inmate Loughnan. As his supposed best friend plunges his knife into a baffled, seemingly impervious Read time and again - during which the victim gives his assailant a warm, sincere hug - the entire sequence resembles less the knowing Tarantino-esque bloodbath it could easily have become, more a bizarre, unsettling hybrid of Alan Clarke and Buster Keaton.
Similarly, although Dominik is unflinching when dealing with the horror of Read's abuse of his girlfriend, he avoids portraying his subject as a one-dimensional bogeyman. Instead, with his metal dental fronts, mutilated Spock-like ears and neurotic preoccupation with failure, Read emerges as both deeply repulsive and strangely pitiful. Avoiding either glamorisation or trite statement-making - limiting its analysis of Read's psychosis to a passing reference to an absent mother and a cheer-leading father who bids him farewell with the bon mot "cheers, big ears" - Dominik's film appears to be dealing in social realism as conceived by Dada.
All of which is aided immeasurably by the startling lead turn of sometime stand-up comedian Eric Bana as 'Uncle Chop-Chop'. Shifting fluently between frenzy and bathos with the merest glimmer in the eye as punctuation, Bana brings a remarkably deft understatement to his role. While Dominik's attitude towards his fame-hungry subject might remain ambiguous (deriding his fixation with celebrity, yet doing so in the context of a feature biopic), Bana's sublime central performance is no less than a film as inspired as this one deserves.
Credits
- Director
- Andrew Dominik
- Producer
- Michele Bennett
- Screenplay
- Andrew Dominik
- Based on the books by
- Mark Brandon Read
- Directors of Photography
- Geoffrey Hall
- Kevin Hayward
- Editor
- Ken Sallows
- Production Designer
- Paddy Reardon
- Music
- Mick Harvey
- ©Australian Film Finance Corporation Limited, Mushroom Pictures Pty Ltd,
- Pariah Films Pty Ltd
- Production Companies
- Australian Film Finance Corporation and Mushroom Pictures present a Pariah Film production
- Financed with the assistance of Australian Film Finance Corporation/Mushroom Pictures
- Development assistance provided by Film Victoria
- Executive Producers
- Al Clark
- Martin Fabinyi
- Co-producer
- Michael Gudinski
- Line Producer
- Yvonne Collins
- Production Co-ordinator
- Jo Warren
- Unit Manager
- Andy Pappas
- Location Manager
- Stephen Brett
- 2nd Unit Director
- Rowan Woods
- Assistant Directors
- Phil Jones
- Jason Faulkner
- Emma Jamvold
- Additional:
- Sonia Bednar
- Continuity
- Joanne McLennan
- Casting
- Greg Apps
- Prototype Casting
- Additional:
- Rachel Bailey
- Script Editors
- Billy Stoneking
- Peter Neale
- Stephen Sewell
- Peter Gawler
- Additional Dialogue
- Jim Hearn
- 2nd Unit Director
of Photography - Richard Hoskings
- Motion Control Camera
- Anthony Lucas
- Visual Effects
- Animal Logic
- Special Effects
- Filmtrix
- Graphic Artists
- Scott Wiemels
- Genevieve McGuckin
- Additional Editing
- Steve Evans
- Art Director
- Jeff Thorp
- Scenic Artist
- Liam Siddell
- Costume Designer
- Terry Ryan
- Wardrobe Supervisor
- Keryn Ribbands
- Hair/Make-up
- Supervisor
- Kirsten Veysey
- Make-up Artist
- Deborah Lester
- Tattoo Artist
- Justine Halliwell
- Prosthetics Make-up
- Bob McCarron
- Hair Stylist
- Deborah Lester
- Title Design
- Peter Barrett
- Titles
- Optical & Graphic
- Opticals
- Paul Cross
- Music Supervisor
- Jacqui Dennis
- Music Editor
- Chris Pettifer
- Engineer
- Ross Cockle
- Soundtrack
- "Don't Fence Me In" - Frankie Laine; "Black & Blue" - Chain; "Sweet Love" - Renée Geyer; "Bad Boy for Love", "Stuck on You" - Rose Tattoo; "Forever Now" - Cold Chisel; "Release the Bats" - The Birthday Party; "Senile Dementia" - The Saints; "Ever Lovin' Man" - The Loved Ones
- Sound Design
- Frank Lipson
- Sound Recordist
- John Schiefelbein
- Mixer
- Steve Burgess
- Sound Editor
- Michael Carden
- Dialogue Editor
- Glenn Newnham
- Foley
- Artist:
- Gerard Long
- Recordist:
- Steve Burgess
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Zev Eleftheriou
- Armourer
- John Fox
- Dog Wrangler
- Luke's Canine & Animal Actors
- Cast
- Eric Bana
- Mark Brandon 'Chopper' Read
- Simon Lyndon
- Jimmy Loughnan
- David Field
- Keithy George
- Dan Wyllie
- Bluey
- Bill Young
- Detective Downey
- Vince Colosimo
- Neville Bartos
- Kenny Graham
- Keith Read
- Kate Beahan
- Tanya
- Renee Brack
- TV interviewer
- Gregory Pitt
- Richard Sutherland
- prison officers 1 & 2
- Gary Waddell
- Kevin Darcy
- Andrew Dunn
- prison officer 3
- Caleb Cluff
- Detective Creswell
- Hilton Henderson
- Detective Wyatt
- Fred Barker
- Governor Beasley
- Alan Close
- medical officer
- Carl Price
- Brunswick court judge
- Mark Stratford
- classification officer
- Brian Mannix
- Ian James
- Johnnie Targan
- Paul the bouncer
- Robert Rabiah
- Nick
- Sam Houli
- Robbo
- Serge Liistro
- Sammy the Turk
- Pam Western
- Tanya's mother
- Peter Hardy
- Detective Cooney
- Sarah Jane King
- glamour queen
- Skye Wansey
- Mandy
- Annalise Emtsis
- Shazzy
- Marcus Taylor
- Jimmy's mate
- Ernie Gray
- crown prosecutor
- David Paterson
- Morris Jeffrey
- Fletcher Humphreys
- Bucky
- Terry Willesee
- current affairs show host
- Certificate
- 18
- Distributor
- Metrodome Distribution Ltd
- 8,473 feet
- 94 minutes 9 seconds
- Dolby Digital
- In Colour