Romper Stomper (Geoffrey Wright, 1992)
Dave the Necrobumper, with support from jdc, gave me a tough assignment for my
impromptu movie dictator club: skinhead Ozploitation.
Fun backstory: I've been having trouble watching any movies lately, partly due to depression-fueled anhedonia and partly due to an overwhelming sense of nihilism and misanthropy from which cinema no longer provides any escape. I can't shake the hopelessness that humanity's entropy is always increasing while its collective empathy is always decreasing, and I see movies, beneath their surfaces, just reinforcing those sad inevitabilities.
In that context,
Romper Stomper was either the best or the worst movie to watch. Its nihilism certainly fits my current mindset, so yay for that, I guess, but, my god, of all the stories to tell, why tell this one? Why have neo-Nazi 'protagonists' or even tell this story from their perspective — especially if you're not even going to engage with those values, beliefs, etc.? It's really just a MacGuffin that gives the movie a controversial edge. By the third act (or maybe even the midpoint), the skinhead stuff is no longer relevant to the story, which devolves into more standard "guy tries to leave gang for girl and sociopathic gang leader tries to stop him" territory.
I browsed through a couple favorable reviews on Letterboxd that all provided very generous readings of the film's themes, suggesting that it paints the skinheads in a bad light and clearly it's not on their side, et cetera, et cetera; or that the film is more just about disaffected youth, of which racist hatred is just an ugly side effect — and it's really no different from how Larry Clarke captures the unlikable characters in
Kids. And, sorry, I just can't accept that right now. Maybe back in 1992, I could have, but not now. Don't make a film about racists if you can't be antiracist about it.
What's annoying is that, if you just take out the skinhead shit, it's a pretty good movie. Like, if instead of skinheads, they're zombies or vampires or whatever, and the rest of the story is exactly the same, it'd deserve to be a cult classic. The (strong) aesthetic of the film already feels like a horror movie, especially the camerawork, and an allegorical approach to the same things would've hit a lot harder. Plus, Russell Crowe, who radiates strong screen presence in this early role, could've easily gone full Nosferatu with it.
Despite all my reservations, I still came very closely to giving this film a passing grade, largely on account of its style and pace, Crowe's performance, and the moments that had me referencing everything in my head from
Lord of the Flies to
A Clockwork Orange to
Romeo and Juliet to
Road Warrior. The last straw for me, however, was a moment near the end when, at the height of tragedy (from the perspective of the skinhead characters, at least), a busload of Japanese tourists shows up, and they start giddily taking photos of the tragedy in cartoonish fashion. This caricature of Asians, who were the main targets of the skinheads' hate and violence in the first half of the film, erased any benefit of the doubt I might have given to the film's themes and the intentions of its storyteller.
Up with empathy.
Grade: C+
Note: I still very much appreciate the recommendation and just the push to watch something/anything and then feel something/anything, even if they were very mixed feelings. It also feels good to engage here on the forums. It's been a while.
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