★★
(M) 102 minutes
Homegrown films tend to be most popular when they traffic in familiar iconography, and by that reckoning I predict some success for Rachel Perkins' Jasper Jones, which assembles so many cliches it might as well be called Australian Movie.
Based on a 2009 novel by Craig Silvey, it's a 1960s coming-of-age story set in the Western Australian wheatbelt town of Corrigin, placid on the surface but with tensions roiling beneath. The hero, Charlie Bucktin, is played by Red Dog: True Blue's Levi Miller – now the designated elfin innocent of Australian cinema, a position he's inherited from Kodi Smit-McPhee.
A shy bookworm in his early teens, Charlie embarks on a real-life adventure when he's woken one night by an unexpected visitor: Jasper Jones (Aaron L. McGrath) is a mixed-race outcast with a reputation for making trouble. Together, the pair head into the moonlit bush, where Charlie learns a ghastly secret and has to make some tough choices.
Basically we've seen all this before, an impression reinforced by a supporting cast full of old friends, including Toni Collette as Charlie's loving if fretful mother, Ruth, and Hugo Weaving as an outwardly sinister recluse.
Angourie Rice, from These Final Hours, again shows her precocious poise as Charlie's sort-of love interest – though it's no surprise that the more charged bond is between Charlie and Jasper, to the point where the film flirts with queer subtext before backing off.
Perkins has outdone most Australian filmmakers in staying consistently active during the past 20 years or so – producing as well as directing, and alternating between film and TV. Yet her approach has been so collaborative it's a challenge to pin down her artistic personality, beyond the obvious fact that most of her work deals with Indigenous themes.
Certainly, she has a sense of how patterns of imagery can build up meaning, in particular how enclosed settings can convey claustrophobia or the weight of the past. Jasper Jones is full of moments where characters look at each other from a distance or with barriers between them – starting with the memorable shot of Jasper peering through Charlie's bedroom window, the louvres masking everything but his eyes.
On the other hand, her staging of longer scenes can be clumsy, with a touch of wilful naivety in the recurring wide shots of the actors facing the camera side by side. There are times when she seems stranded between realism and overt theatricality without gaining the advantages of either – as in Charlie and Jasper's journey through the bush, where the dead of night looks implausibly well-lit.
Other weaknesses here spring from the script by Silvey and Shaun Grant, which is weighed down with literary allusions and has the kind of rambling structure more acceptable in a novel or a TV series than a movie. We might well ask why the film is named after Jasper, who beyond the first act seems more peripheral than central.
Then again, it's hard to say if there is a centre to a narrative that jumps from one subplot to another in the manner of a soap opera. Jasper is tied up with two quite separate mysteries – and other scenes seem to be included purely for their own sake, as when Charlie's cricket-mad friend Jeffrey (Kevin Long) finally gets his chance to shine.
If anything holds all this together, it's simply a determination to congratulate the audience for sympathy with underdogs and indignation at prejudice and abuse. From the vantage point of 1969, the ideally sensitive Charlie and his mates are the future: in other words, they're us. At the same time, there are enough decent adults around to reassure us that Perkins isn't attacking cherished Aussie myths with anything like the fierceness of, say, Jocelyn Moorhouse in The Dressmaker.
Almost by default, the most intriguing character is Ruth, played by Collette as a bundle of contradictions: loving but angry, straitlaced but out of control. What exactly has gone wrong in her relationship with her soft-spoken husband (Dan Wyllie)? For once, we're allowed to draw our own conclusions – and while this ambiguity may not reflect Silvey's original conception of the character, it comes as a relief in a film otherwise bent on telling us how to feel at every moment.