Draft of an entry for the Intellect Directory of Australian and New Zealand Cinema
Chopper (2000)
Country of Origin: Australia
Director: Andrew Dominik
Screenwriter: Andrew Dominik
Producer: Michele Bennett
Editor: Ken Sallows
Director of Photography: Geoffrey Hall, Kevin Hayward
Production Designer: Paddy Reardon
Genre: crime, prison
Duration: 94 mins
Cast: Eric Bana, Simon Lyndon, Dan Wyllie, Vince Colosimo, Kate Beahan
Synopsis:
1991. Notorious standover man Mark Brandon ‘Chopper’ Read (Eric Bana) watches himself being interviewed on television from his prison cell. Flashback to 1978. In Pentridge Prison, Chopper launches an unprovoked attack on a fellow prisoner, a senior trades union figure, stabbing him repeatedly in the face and neck. Chopper denies any involvement, but after the prisoner dies, a contract is put on Chopper’s head. He is attacked by his cellmates Jimmy (Simon Lyndon) and Bluey (Dan Wyllie), but survives. In hospital Chopper initially refuses to make a statement, until he learns that Jimmy has made a statement against him and filed a claim for compensation through the victims of crime fund. Chopper requests a transfer to another prison, fearing further attacks, but prison authorities refuse. He convinces another prisoner to cut off his ears in order to secure the transfer. 1986. Chopper, recently released from prison, takes his girlfriend Tanya (Kate Beahan), a prostitute, to Bojangles nightclub. Neville (Vince Colosimo), a former associate who Chopper kneecapped some years earlier, approaches him. Neville is friendly and forgiving, but Chopper is suspicious and leaves the club after drawing a handgun and firing several shots into the ceiling. Chopper argues with Tanya, accusing her of sleeping with Neville. Tanya storms off, but Chopper kicks down her front door and beats her up. In a bar, Chopper gives information to two police officers, believing that they will turn a blind eye to his activities. Chopper goes to Neville’s mansion to apologise. Reluctantly, Neville lets him in, but becomes angry when Chopper asks for money. Chopper shoots Neville in the stomach, then helps Neville’s henchmen take him to hospital. Chopper goes to see his former cellmate Jimmy who is now a junkie living with his heavily pregnant girlfriend Mandy in a squalid apartment. Chopper pulls a gun on Jimmy, and demands to know if Jimmy is planning to kill him on Neville’s behalf. Jimmy manages to talk him down. Back at Bojangles nightclub, Chopper meets Sammy the Turk. Believing he is being set up, Chopper follows Sammy outside to the carpark and shoots him in the head, unaware that Mandy has been watching. In the bar, Chopper tells the police a different version of events, but feels insulted when they disbelieve him. Mandy turns crown witness and testifies against Chopper. He is acquitted of murder, but sentenced to five years for malicious wounding. 1991. In the prison yard, Chopper is interviewed by a television journalist following the publication of his memoirs. In his cell he watches the interview on television with two prison officers. They leave, and Chopper is left alone, staring at the wall.
Critique
Andrew Dominik’s stylish and disturbingly amusing film about real-life violent criminal Mark ‘Chopper’ Read begins with a title that announces “This film is a dramatisation in which narrative liberties have been taken. It is not a biography”. This loosely fictionalised film forms part of a minor but important strain of Australian screen culture: dramatisations of the lives or exploits of real-life outlaws. This almost true-crime subgenre includes the various films about Ned Kelly, and Kevin Dobson’s 1982 feature about eponymous 1920s Melbourne gangster Squizzy Taylor. The subgenre has become a staple part of Australian television drama in the last decade – due, in some part no doubt to the success of Chopper – with, first, the 2003 telemovie The Postcard Bandit about bank robber and serial escapee Brendan Abbot, and most recently the two Underbelly television series (2008-9).
Adapted from Read’s best-selling memoirs, which now run to twelve books, Chopper makes clear at an early stage that while the central character is a gifted storyteller and raconteur, he is far from a reliable narrator. Throughout the film the same events are presented several times, Rashomon-like in slightly different versions. The murder of Sammy the Turk is replayed three times, once with the main characters (including the unfortunate Sammy) recounting their parts direct to camera in lilting, rhyming prose. What is depicted onscreen is often at odds with the stories Read tells the police and others during the film. This is consistent with the shifting mythology that has grown around Read, much of it created by the man himself. By his own admission, he has killed 19 people and injured many more, although, as he proudly and repeatedly observes, no “innocent characters” were ever hurt. Read’s books have sold thousands of copies, and he regularly tours his live show around Australia.
Chopper is notable for its visual style and its play with time. The opening titles play across low angle time lapse shots of clouds scudding across the sky above a prison, and several scenes are speeded up for comic effect, first as a visual representation of characters who have just snorted speed, and later in the poetic retelling of Sammy the Turk’s murder to emphasise the way in which this event rapidly entered popular folklore. The lighting of different scenes is expressive and arresting. The sequences in the prison cells and exercise areas contrast the grey-blue of the actors’ faces and clothes, the colour of cigarette smoke, with the bright, white walls. The brothel bedroom in which Chopper hooks up with Tanya following his release from prison is a luscious red that is almost painful to look at, and this palette is carried through to the interior of the nightclub. The lounge room in Chopper’s father’s house is the colour of nicotine-stained fingers, while the kitchen is bathed in a mouldy blue-green light. A similar contrast is used in the scene in which Chopper visits Jimmy and Mandy’s wretched apartment: the stairwell and front door are dirty brown, while the interior of the apartment is a sickly, unnatural green.
The film is full of images and moments that have already achieved iconic status, although perhaps the most memorable does not feature in the film itself. The image that adorned the film’s publicity materials and the DVD cover features Bana shirtless, with his tattoo-covered arms crossed over his similarly-illustrated chest, holding two revolvers, his face expressionless but menacingly powerful with trademark handlebar moustache and aviator sunglasses clinging to his earless-head.
Along with the thrice-told murder of Sammy the Turk, perhaps the most extraordinary scene in the film is that in which an unsuspecting Chopper is repeatedly stabbed by his cellmate and long-time accomplice Jimmy Loughnan. At first, Chopper thinks Jimmy is playfully sparring with him. “A bit early for kung fu, isn’t it?” he asks. Jimmy plunges the knife again and again into the stunned Chopper, who calmly admonishes him “Now Jimmy, if you keep stabbing me, you’re going to kill me”. Rather than fighting back, Chopper hugs his assailant as if he can’t quite believe what is happening. Jimmy stabs him again and they end up face to face in a close embrace, as if they are about to kiss each other. Chopper removes his clothes to inspect his gaping wounds, then collapses into Jimmy’s arms. This extraordinary scene is made more remarkable when it is later revealed that Chopper is only in prison because he held a judge hostage in an attempt to have Jimmy released from jail.
To date, director Andrew Dominik has only made two feature films since graduating from Swinburne Film School in 1988. Chopper, his first film, reportedly took seven years to make, most of which was spent convincing nervous investors that the morally repugnant but compelling stories by and about Read were worth committing to celluloid. It would be another seven years before Dominik’s next film, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), was completed. Dominik’s second film about a notorious outlaw is as visually striking as his first, but while he won a number of awards including Best Achievement in Direction at the 2001 Australian Film Institute Awards for Chopper, and despite the plaudits deservedly heaped on cinematographer Roger Deakins for Jesse James (including the 2008 Academy Award for Best Achievement in Cinematography), Dominik’s achievements in Jesse James were largely, and unjustly, overlooked.
As well as directing both films, Dominik wrote the screenplays for Chopper, and Jesse James. His first film magnificently captures Chopper Read’s characteristic, mannered delivery and verbal dexterity, and the film is full of beautifully crafted exchanges between Chopper and his associates. “You’re fucking sick, Read. You’re insane,” yells Keithy George shortly before his grisly demise. “Beethoven had his critics,” Chopper replies. “See if you can name three of them.” After he fails to convince the police of his involvement in the murder of Sammy the Turk, he disconsolately tells his father “I used to be Chopper Read. Now I can’t get arrested in this town.”
In contrast with Dominik’s stop-start film career, lead actor Eric Bana has gone from strength to strength following his unforgettable performance as Chopper. He was cast, first, in a supporting role in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001), before his first Hollywood lead as Bruce Banner/the Hulk in Ang Lee’s much maligned 2003 version of the comic-book classic. Bana, a former (and much loved) stand-up and television comedian, has consistently proven his talent and versatility with major parts in such diverse films as Wolfgang Peterson’s Troy (2004, as Hector), Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005, as Avner), Justin Chadwick’s The Other Boleyn Girl (2008, as Henry Tudor), JJ Abrams’ Star Trek (2009, as Nero) and Robert Schwentke’s The Time Traveller’s Wife (2009, as Henry DeTamble). In between his Hollywood roles, Bana has regularly returned to Australia to lend his talent and profile to local feature films and to make a documentary about his obsession with cars, Love the Beast (2009).
