The Pen Is Mightier the than Gun JUSTIN KURZEL’S TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG AND PUNK HISTORIOGRAPHY
As anyone who frequents film festivals of any scale can attest, there’s a near-ritualistic approach to scheduling as one maps out the sequence of movies one hopes to see. Running times, venue locations, care factors – all come together in an often much-laboured final timetable constructed to ensure the optimum festival experience. While it’s hard to think of an exercise more intrinsically bourgeois in the context of the contemporary art world, it is also, to be fair, a lot of fun.
These were the thoughts I was having as I sat patiently in a giant cinema in Toronto’s downtown Scotiabank Theatre, about two blocks away from the prestigious heart of the Toronto International Film Festival, the TIFF Bell Lightbox. This was the terrain across which we comrades-in-scheduling trudged back and forth, between films passionately anticipated and, well, those that just happened to fit neatly into gaps until the next films-passionately-anticipated. While, for me, the world premiere of Justin Kurzel’s fourth feature, True History of the Kelly Gang (2019), certainly fell into the former category, for the two young women sitting next to me, it was unambiguously the latter. As we chatted before the screening began, they were surprised to learn that Ned Kelly (played in the film by George MacKay) was even a real person – they were there because Nick Cave’s son, Earl, was in the film. Which he is, and his stand-out performance as youngest Kelly son Dan is, in fact, more than
