Hando (Russell Crowe) and his best mate Davey (Daniel Pollock) lead a rampaging gang of neo-Nazi skinheads in Footscray, Melbourne, during the 80s. They beat up young Vietnamese migrants, get drunk and fall down, living off the dole, in a disused tyre shop draped with Nazi flags. Gabe (Jacqueline McKenzie), running from an incestuous relationship with her rich father, joins the gang as Hando’s girlfriend, but Davey is also attracted to her. When young Vietnamese retaliate, led by Tiger (Tony Lee), the skinheads escape to a disused warehouse, where Hando plots his revenge. Gabe pursues her own vengeance, by leading the gang into her father’s house. When Hando kicks her out, she tells the cops where the gang are hiding. Routed again, this time by the police – Hando, Davey and Gabe take to the road.
Romper Stomper was an incendiary device aimed at the culture of comfort in middle-class Australia in the early 90s. It had the exact effect that its writer-director intended, provoking outrage and retaliation, which then attracted a large youth audience to see it. The mayor of Fitzroy in Melbourne denounced it, along with the prominent Australian critic David Stratton, who said it should have never been made. Several film-makers said it was racist towards Asians, and sympathetic towards skinhead Neo-Nazis. Many similar things were said about Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, made in the UK 20 years earlier, a film from which Romper Stomper borrows heavily – but the outrage was similarly misdirected.
One of the reasons that Romper Stomper was so shocking was that it was so well made. It placed the viewer as a participant in the action, implicating us in the enjoyment these young men and women feel during the exercise of violence. Geoffrey Wright’s refusal to condemn their actions is part of this challenge to the viewer – you may want to disown them, but he makes you one of them, by the way he places the camera. The accusation of racism is hard to understand, given that he simply shows the young Vietnamese men responding to extreme provocation. They are hardly depicted as victims, in that sense.
Wright’s skill with action and violence, so early in his career, reminds us of another debut feature film from 13 years earlier, Mad Max, but Romper Stomper is altogether more morally complex and challenging. It’s not about the dystopian future – but the ugly present. In another sense, it’s a continuation of the Australian bush-ranging film traditions of the Story of the Kelly Gang, made in 1906, but without the bush, or the sentimentalism. In a way, Hando and his mates are the modern descendants of the Australian outlaw ethos – protecting their land, just like the Kelly’s. They’re just a whole lot more alienated from the wider community, but their own sense of community is very strong. The film is about family at heart – the Vietnamese family, the skinhead family, and Gabe’s own completely screwed up wreckage of a family. It’s not pretty or comforting, but it’s an incredibly exciting film to watch, and that forces the viewer to confront his or her attitudes to violence as entertainment.
Russell Crowe has been immortalized on a series of Australian postal stamps. The collectibles feature images of the famous actor in his latest role—Robin Hood.
"The release of the film Robin Hood this month is of global interest," a spokesman for Australia Post said. "We thought it would be very fitting to pay tribute to this great actor by producing the Robin Hood stamp pack."
Crowe was born in New Zealand but became an Australian citizen in 2006. This is the second time his adopted country has put him on postage stamps: Last year he appeared in a series that honored Australian Oscar winners.
From GotchaMovies
Gettin’ Square was written by a Gold Coast criminal lawyer, Chris Nyst, which explains the film’s strong sense of authenticity. It’s primarily a comedy in the well-established style of the London criminal comedy caper, but the Gold Coast setting adds an ironic flavour – palm trees, bikini car washes, and lots of people with expensive clothes and no taste. Beneath the verbal humour, some of which has a strongly Australian flavour, there’s a deep sympathy for the characters, particularly the powerless ones like Barry (Sam Worthington) and his prison mate Johnny ‘Spit’ Spitieri (David Wenham).
David Wenham’s performance as Spit makes the movie, both as comedy and as social observation. His courtroom bamboozling of the lawyers and bureaucrats is one of the highlights of Wenham’s already distinguished career – a comic tour-de-force in which he cons two lawyers out of $40, tells them nothing, and gets away with it. They never even realise they’ve been had. But Johnny is more than simply a comic character. He’s the best evidence of the complete failure of the system. No one offers him help at any stage; no one except his mate Barry even cares what happens to him. He’s ‘just a junkie’, and his only value to the police and the lawyers is in his possible testimony against the bigger fish.
The film doesn’t distinguish between the cops and the villains – they’re all villains, one way or the other. In fact, the only characters with any sense of honour and fair play are Dabba, the ex-criminal trying to go straight, Barry the ex-criminal who wants to be a chef, and Johnny Spitieri, a man so beaten down by heroin and prison that he retains a childlike innocence. This was the second feature of Jonathan Teplitzky, after Better Than Sex (2000). David Wenham starred in both films. For Gettin’ Square, Wenham won the AFI Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role.
