Breaker Morant
by Bruce Beresford
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Bryan Brown, Charles 'Bud' Tingwell, Edward Woodward, Jack Thompson, John Waters (III)Director: Bruce Beresford
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Color, DVD-Video, Letterboxed, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: Letterbox, 1.85:1
Running Time: 107 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1997-11-12
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Fox Lorber
Movie Reviews of Breaker Morant
Movie Review: Lessons from History
Summary: 5 Stars
So, who says the movies are strictly an entertainment medium. Occasionally a burst of reality manages to sneak through. In Breaker Morant we're shown what most of us suspect anyway-- that in war, the demands of politics trump the demands of justice. Kubrick revealed the lesson in 1958's Paths of Glory, where it was the French high command sacrificing three hapless dogfaces to protect France's war effort or at least those charged with waging it. Here it's the fabled British Empire on which the sun never sets and whose responsibility never ceases. It's a heavy burden-- civilizing the rabble, known to Kipling and his acolytes as the White Man's Burden. But then, it's got to be the correct white men doing the civilizing and maybe helping themselves at the same time to whatever riches the land may offer. The South African Boers simply won't do. Look at them-- there're a scruffy lot and besides they're blood related to those other white men wanting to create an Empire, the Germans. Can't have all those subjugated black Africans responding to two civilizing saviors at the same time. One has to go.
Fine screenplay, a needed corrective to all those heroic "thin red line" celebrations that propagandized the Western world for decades. The trouble here is that the Boers fight dirty. They don't line up in disciplined squadrons and fight in a civilized manner. They're sort of like those rustic American colonists conducting guerilla raids when and where they can. Funny how motivated the rabble can be when they're fighting for their homes and way of life. But the British are a disciplined lot. They don't take their responsibilities lightly. Just watch the robotic precision with which they execute their deadly hierarchy. The foot stomping obeisances to authority and tradition are a matter of deep-down pride in Crown, God, and Empire.
However, the Aussies are only half British. They don't even stuff easily into the regimented coffins at movie's end. Here the three Aussie officers are no angels. They take their orders literally, and when the British high command says take no prisoners, they obey and shoot the hapless captives with no second thoughts. But then the Dutch Boers are no angels either, mutilating the unlucky British when they can. There's a message here, one that Americans in Iraq should take heed of. People defending their homes and way of life don't fight fair. They tend to get upset with foreign invaders telling them how to live. And, as the movie shows, don't expect the boys sent on the civilizing mission to come back the way they left. There's a price to pay for fighting in a dirty imperial war when it's not your home or livelihood you're defending. That's what's so unsettling to believers in the White Man's Burden about a screenplay like this. As Morant and especially the earnest attorney learn too late, such wars are not about justice or noble ideals. They're about power, raw imperial power, whether it's the South Africa of yesterday or the Iraq of today. And those mighty wheels of Empire are capable of running over anything and anybody who gets in the proverbial way. Here those wheels grind in a dramatically grievous manner, and one you're not likely to forget.
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Summary of Breaker Morant
Before coming to America to make such acclaimed films as Tender Mercies and Driving Miss Daisy, Australian director Bruce Beresford made a lasting impression with this compelling courtroom drama, considered one the finest films of the Australian new wave of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Based on a true story about three soldiers in the Boer War who are served up as political scapegoats of the British Empire, the film uses a flashback structure to dramatize the courtroom testimony. It begins when the three Australian soldiers are railroaded for the justified killing of a German missionary and placed on trial for court-martial not as a matter of justice, but to mollify the German government for the sake of political expediency. Burdened with a competent but inexperienced and hopelessly disadvantaged lawyer, the soldiers realize that their fate has been sealed and the outcome of their trial is a fait accompli. Unfolding with urgent precision and a riveting focus on its well-drawn characters, Breaker Morant was the all-time box-office hit in Australia at the time of its release in 1980, and it remains one of the very best historical dramas ever made. --Jeff ShannonArt House & International DVD Video
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