_Once Were Warriors_
reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs


     Lee Tamahori's first feature film introduces its characters and
themes with a carefully telegraphic set-up, intimating that surfaces - and
dreams - can be deceiving. Opening on what looks like a lovely landscape,
the camera pulls back, revealing that it's a billboard, an advertisement
for an imaginary other universe, one which is immediately contrasted with
its urban setting: the buzz, trash, and traffic that fills a New Zealand
city street. An electric guitar thrums loudly, the air seems to crackle, a
woman with tattoos and short skirt pushes her shopping cart, headed home,
past graffitied walls and guys in leather rapping on streetcorners. 

     Based on a novel by Maori writer Alan Duff, _Once Were Warriors_
traces the story of Beth Heke (Rena Owen), a mother of five, married to
the extremely volatile Jake (Temuera Morrison). Duff's book ignited all
kinds of controversy for its graphic portrayal of domestic violence within
a Maori family (complaints centered on its "negative'' representation of
Maoris). The movie puts a (slightly) more positive spin on things
(Tamahori says it has "hope [and] heart''), and it's been a blockbuster
hit in New Zealand, the highest-grossing film ever released there. Tightly
structured, to the point of (an emotionally effective) neatness, Riwia
Brown's screenplay advocates a return to a traditional, tribal sense of
coherence, while remaining sympathetic to the daily pressures of
contemporary conditions. 

     Shot through with hyperreal stylistics, the film offers a complicated
portrait of the many social and economic pains that trigger spousal abuse,
and its profound effects on women and children, of course, but also on the
men who have trouble finding steady work or communal connections. The
streets are sharply colorful (Jake pumps iron with his friends in an
open-air cage, their sunglasses glinting in the bright sunlight; Beth's
approving look at him suggests at least some of the mutual attraction that
continues to fuel their relationship), the soundtrack is dead-on pulsing,
the interiors are shot on harsh, claustrophobic angles. The bar where the
guys hang out drinking beer is the site for several climactic
confrontations; it's a huge converted warehouse, a combination of vast
space and neon oppressiveness that visualizes the contradictions of their
lives, their ritual camaraderie and their barely containable resentments
and frustrations. When, early on, a woman singer is interrupted by a
young, thick-necked thug at the jukebox, Jake erupts. It's a moment of
furious, territorial violence, whose stunning brutality hangs in the air
even as he returns to the table, pleased with himself and congratulated by
his impressed audience. 

     Morrison was an unlikely choice for the role of the menacing but
magnetic Jake; he's the star of a popular soap opera, _Shortland Street_,
in which he plays a pleasant, good-guy doctor. Bulked up and glowering,
his Jake is fractured and compelling, given to excessive drinking and
explosive violence but also capable of extraordinary tenderness. While he
and Beth sing love songs together for the entertainment of their
hard-drinking friends late into the night, their children listen in their
bedroom upstairs, smiling together at the serenity they know will be
short- lived (one child says, "Aren't they beautiful when they're like
that?''). The tension builds slowly, but eventually, Jake attacks Beth,
slamming her around their tiny kitchen while the kids huddle together
upstairs and their friends leave quickly, unable or unwilling to intervene
in what is apparently a very familiar scene. 

     As Beth, Owen gives a heroic performance, both roughly confident and
devastatingly vulnerable. While she is clearly strong and
independent-minded, she also willfully denies the threat that Jake (and
his friends) pose to her life and that of her family. (The actor, daughter
of a white [in Maori, Pakeha] mother and Maori father, cites her own
background as a kind of source material; once arrested as an accessory to
drug dealing, she spent time in a London prison, afterwards she took
acting lessons and returned to New Zealand, wanting to bring Maori images
to a next generation of theater and movie-goers.) The film is focused
through Beth's experience, especially her turn to her family's spiritual
roots, as she realizes that 18 years together and an enduring, passionate
love for her husband aren't enough to sustain the illusion of a liveable
marriage. 

     Her children act out the effects of this ongoing artifice and the
desperate nostalgia that underlies it. The eldest son, Nig (Julian [Sonny]
Arahanga), turns to an alternative family, a local gang renowned for its
elaborate full body tattoos. On his way to his initiation, he sits, small
and unmarked, between two giant gang members in the front seat of their
car; the beating that follows is fast and hard, echoing Jake's assaults
(on other men and on Beth) and underlining the ways that violence offers a
perversely satisfying structure, an urgent sense of allegiance and
commitment. He returns home with scars and tattoos, proud emblems of his
new affiliation, which underscore the film's links between past and
present. 

     Second son Boogie (Taungaroa Emile) is picked up by stiff-jawed
authorities and removed to a home for delinquent boys (Beth can't appear
with him in court because she's been so badly beaten the night before). At
the boys' home, Boogie learns to rechannel his frustrations into ancient
warrior rituals, beautiful, fiercely disciplined demonstrations of
self-control in the face of surrounding chaos. But it's their sensitive,
significantly named daughter Grace (Mamengaroa Kerr-Bell) who bears the
emotional brunt of their domestic disorder; she dutifully takes care of
the younger children and writes lovely, imaginative fairy-tales, which she
shares with her quietly supportive best friend, a homeless boy named Toot
(Shannon Williams), as they hide out away from the world, in the abandoned
car-carcass where he lives, framed by traffic noises and the night sky
barely glimpsed over the highway bridge. 

     _Once Were Warriors_ intelligently refuses to reduce its characters'
emotional predicaments to simple moral or social dichotomies. Tamahori
says that the problems here are not so much based in racism, but in class
oppressions. He points out that although Maoris now comprise only 12
percent of the country's population of 3 million, they have a longstanding
legacy of integration with white Europeans. "Unlike other indigenous
peoples of the world,'' he says, "there was no genocide ever practiced
upon the Maori and they were never forcibly removed to other areas, so, by
and large, our history is one of an appreciation of both cultures and
intermarriage amongst them.'' Accordingly, the film's emphasis on the
Maoris' rich cultural background is less angry than sad (and eventually
celebratory), an effort to reclaim a sense of order and situatedness often
lost in the speed of contemporary urban living. 

     The pain of such effort is probably captured more powerfully by the
movie's visual intensity, than by its melodramatic narrative. Many of its
images, whether grim or gorgeous, are unforgettable: the weird romance of
the abandoned car-yard, the blood-stained walls after Beth has been
beaten, the first look at Nig's tattoos. This attention to detail is what
makes the film resonate for me, its insistence on the daily, visible
effects of continually blurring boundaries, between cultures, between
experiences, between times. 



Cynthia Fuchs teaches film and media studies at George Mason University.

Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs.  All rights reserved.
Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author.

This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.