Back in cinemas for its 25th anniversary, the movie that killed Poida is as exhilarating and disturbing as ever.
What hath Chopper wrought?
It’s not like Australia didn’t have a strong legacy of crime cinema before. Our very first feature film, 1906’s The Story of the Kelly Gang, falls into that category. Then there’s Stir, Money Movers, Fortress, and so on and so on. Even the original Mad Max, pre-apocalyptic and largely free of the later films’ post-collapse iconography, is imbued with a lot of DNA from the crime genre.
Still, it’s easy to divide Aussie crime cinema into two broad eras for our purposes, and the post-Chopper era is characterised by abundance. Animal Kingdom, Snowtown, The Square, Hounds of Love, Thomas M. Wright‘s eviscerating The Stranger, and the entire, tasteless totality of the Underbelly franchise. There were a few films that presaged Chopper like the first pebbles of an avalanche – Gregor Jordan’s Two Hands on the lighter end of the spectrum, Rowan Woods punishing The Boys at the other – but Andrew Dominik’s debut feature was the epochal shift.
It certainly made a star of Eric Bana. There are stories of VHS tapes of Chopper being passed around the set of Black Hawk Down, his first American film, and his co-stars marveling at his transformative performance. It was transformative, alright; Chopper turned Bana from a light entertainer into a serious dramatic actor overnight, a swerve impossible to predict even with 20/20 hindsight. At the time, he was best known for playing amiable bogan Poida on Fast Forward. Since, he’s largely stuck to more serious fare and the odd bill-paying blockbuster. Voice roles aside, his last notable comedic turn was in 2009’s Funny People, and even that was a dramedy.
Famously, it was the real Chopper who recommended Bana. Mark “Brandon “Chopper” Read, lifelong criminal and inveterate liar, upon whose lamentable life and legend the film is based, saw something in Bana, and he wasn’t wrong. For all its stylistic flourishes and narrative complexities, Chopper lives and ides by Bana’s mercurial performance. Bana captures the contradictions of the character. His performance lives in the gulf between Chopper’s self image – a larrikin outlaw antihero – and the grubby, repellant reality.
Chopper‘s power as a film comes from the way it examines a similar, broader contradiction: Australia’s marked tendency to make heroes of villains and martyrs of monsters. It’s a myth about the process of myth-making, encapsulated in the incredible sequence where Read’s awkward, messy murder of Sammy the Turk (Serge Liistro) goes through several permutations before ultimately being reduced to a limerick.
You could argue that the film is a result of the same process, that it elevates and simplifies a pretty detestable person, but that’s what makes it such a neat trick – it criticises itself before anyone else has chance to.
Which is a Get Out Of Jail Free card, I guess.
Chopper is in limited theatrical release now.
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