One man's conviction divided a nation.
Based on a real life event during a dark time in Australia's history, Black and white is set in conservative Adelaide during the 50s.
A charming lawyer, David O'Sullivan (Robert Carlyle), is given the news that he must defend a legal aid case for a young aboriginal man, Max Stuart (David Ngoombujarra), who has been arrested for the murder of an 8-year-old girl in the desert town of Ceduna.
O'Sullivan concludes that Max has been framed, a confession beaten out of him by police.
Special Agent Matti
What a waste of time and money.
Robert Carlyle doesn't just phone in his performance, he spends most of his time on screen wishing he were somewhere else; you can see it in his eyes. He looks like the wombat who volunteered to cross the first road through the outback, just to show that it's safe for all the other animals, caught in the headlights of the first truck to drive down the first road. I've see better performances from a lamp post. I leap to the conclusion that Robert was signed up so that the film could get financing (with the great Australian cultural cringe in operation we can't make films without overseas stars) and that the script changed several times between him signing the contract and turning up on set.
Speaking of Louis Nowra's script: it sucks. The scenes are only loosely connected, the characters wander about without any purpose and the plot has as much drive as three-week-old lettuce. Black and white is supposed to be a taut, tense courtroom murder mystery with a bit of rampant racism thrown in for good measure. Instead it has all the drama of... well... three-week-old lettuce.
Kerry Fox is on-screen for all of five minutes and averages one sentence per minute. Ben Mendelsohn's impression of a young Rupert Murdoch gets six minutes on-screen and the same one sentence per minute average. Charles Dance plays the uptight racist in one dimension (that's all he's given). The only actor who is given any opportunity to shine - and who takes that opportunity - is David Ngoombujarra as the hard-done-by Max Stuart, and even his performance is uneven.
Black and white started with a bad script and went downhill from there. Craig Lahiff's direction is second-rate, leaving the actors with no-one to help them tune their performances. I'm sorry to say that once again, Australia has produced a film that just isn't worth watching.
M (Adult themes, medium level violence, medium level coarse language)
99 minutes (1:39 hours)
Film: 31 October 2002
DVD rental: 19 February 2003
VHS rental: 19 February 2003