Review: Jasper Jones

Set in 1969 in a fictional Western Australian small town, Levi Miller stars as 14 year-old Charlie Buktin, who gets a knock at his window one night from the title half-white, half-Indigenous boy a couple of years older (Aaron McGrath). Seen by many as a local delinquent already, Jasper’s in deeper than usual trouble as he takes Charlie (whom he has never spoken to before) out into the woods to show him something horrible, the dead and hanging body of a local girl. Jasper fears that he’ll be blamed for it since he’d been seeing the girl for a bit behind her parents’ back, and also because of his part-Aboriginal background. It’s 60s rural Australia after all. Jasper claims he’s innocent, and wants young Charlie’s help in finding out who did kill her. Jasper believes it was likely town hermit ‘Mad’ Jack Lionel (Hugo Weaving) who is rumoured to have killed someone many years ago, whilst Charlie has no idea what to think. Meanwhile, the marriage between Charlie’s bored mother (Toni Collette) and laidback schoolteacher father (Dan Wyllie) is seemingly on shaky ground. The former also proves to be a loving but slightly harsh disciplinarian parent. Angourie Rice plays the murder victim’s younger sister who seems keen on the rather distracted Charlie, and Matt Nable is the rather unfriendly, no-nonsense local copper.

Adapted from a Craig Silvey novel, this 2017 Australian blend of coming-of-age flick and mystery from director Rachel Perkins (“Bran Nue Dae”, which I’m ashamed to admit I still haven’t seen. I need to correct that) doesn’t have a whole lot wrong with it. Well, except that it’s almost a total rip-off of Harper Lee’s near-unbeatable literary classic To Kill A Mockingbird. Yeah, that’s kind of a big problem for me, a problem that most Aussie critics having typically glossed over I might add. I’m an Aussie myself, but unlike many of my brethren (I’m sure most Aussie readers know the two famous Aussie critics in particular I’m thinking of in this regard), I try to review films as unbiased as possible, and I have to say what sounded intriguing going in, ended up disappointing me greatly. It’s not just that it’s a rip-off. No, it’s a rip-off of one of my favourite books and one that I studied in high school, so I found it really hard to get into this one for that reason.

It’s nice to see a film made in Western Australia and set in Western Australia, and at first this classic coming-of-age stuff seemed promising. However, rather quickly, more and more of the story seemed very familiar to me as scripted by Shaun Grant (the genuinely disturbing “Snowtown”) and author Silvey himself. The parallels to Harper Lee’s classic aren’t entirely exact (the character played by Toni Collette has no connection to Mockingbird at all), but they’re too close for comfort, especially since they make the film’s trajectory far too predictable to really become invested in. Basically, the title character is a half-Aboriginal version of Tom Robinson (racism also rears its ugly head here in a local Korean immigrant family too), Levi Miller is Scout with a sex change (and a touch of Henry Thomas in “Frog Dreaming”), and Hugo Weaving’s ‘Mad’ Jack Lionel is pretty much the Boo Radley figure, ruining some of what I assume was meant to be a surprise to the audience. Yeah, not-so surprising to people who’ve read a very famous book and can see it coming a mile away. Even worse, one poorly directed and acted scene (the only poorly acted scene in the film, actually) reveals who the villain of the piece will be and although not an exact match, there’s a connection to Mockingbird there, too. You could possibly call Dan Wyllie a fart joke-loving version of Atticus Finch, but that might be a stretch, I suppose.

It’s a real shame, because the sense of time and place are nicely captured, and it’s all for nought because it’s a thinly veiled version of an American classic repurposed in Western Australia with only minor changes. Reading the plot synopsis at the start might not give you that impression, but it’s not long into the film when you’ll start to catch on to its familiarity. Wyllie and Toni Collette (playing a character you can’t quite love nor hate) are good, Weaving is fine, and I honestly think Angourie Rice is going to be a star one day. In the end though, I just didn’t embrace this one as much as I’d like to have.

Well-acted, good looking, but why bother with an inferior version of what is a widely available literary classic (hell, the Gregory Peck film version is rock-solid too)? I’d seen almost all of the story beats and character types before and done better, so the story was transparent to me. Objectively it’s reasonably well-made, but due to what I’d even go so far as to call borderline plagiarism, I feel it’s ultimately an unfortunate near-miss for me.

Rating: C+