j* Movie Reviews 2019

The Nightingale (2019)

Dark and pretty landscapes and brutal history, but note well: it's a historic drama.

I love a film shot outside - using the real landscapes and wildness. For me it is just another level of beauty and maybe dedication. And this makes epic use of Tasmanian landscapes. I feel like I knew individual trees. And particular lichens. Very Tas-gothic, very ethereally pretty.

But it's a historic drama. One with a few more brutal than usual moments, to be sure. But it is all period accurate and leaves you with that dreary and bleak "bah, history" feeling. And I hear you, I hear you say "but it said it was a historic drama" and now, in hindsight, I can see, perhaps, that this was meant more clearly to be marketed as a historic drama. But that's not what I was going to see. I was going to see a Revenge Film... to get some good old vigilante justice.

So lets back up a second and detour.

I live with a guy who likes his spicy-chilli things super hot. 11/10, "Thai hot", bum-burning, head-sweating nasty. I do not like things that spicy-hot, I'm much more a medium level hot. But because I'm so used to dodging ridiculous levels of hot, sometimes I start to feel I'm only a mild heat person... but I'm not, I'm into medium, possibly even upper medium.

"What does all this curry talk have to do with Nightingale?" It's a fair question.

<Some spoilers after this point>

The guy I live with (it's the same spicy-food guy) also has quite a thing for vigilante revenge flicks. Really violent ones. And in the same way that being around someone's food influences how you feel about food, being around a lot of a genre can change the way you deal with those too. So I've probably got a pretty deep read on "revenge" and "vigilante." And I'm probably not into 11/10 vigilante-heat, but I am definitely into the upper levels of medium-heat revenge. When you're down with that, the trailer for Nightingale throws up a lot of "Hells yes! Revenge m*therfucker!" flags. It sets the mood for avenging justice.

But the film doesn't. Because it's a historic drama. With some brutal bits.

I can only assume a lot of the reviewers are much more at the mild-heat for vigilante revenge because they're bandying around a lot of revenge film terms so glowingly and the heat just wasn't there for me. So for the first half or so I felt it was slow, but building. Then finally the Nightingale gets to really destroy this guy, and it's intense and bloody and in the scheme of the bad guys who needed the avenging he was really only a little man. And it felt like by the time she worked her way up to the really bad ones it might be epic.

But this isn't Peppermint. And it's not The Crow. And despite the frequent, brutal raping, it's not A Vigilante (2018) either.

It's The Nightingale, and it's a historical drama.

So it doesn't conform to the conventions of satisfying revenge.

Then it sort of segueways and turns into a walking movie. For a long time. A lot of walking. Pretty landscape, but oh my, the walking. All the revenge-energy, or revenergy, evaporates and by the time we eventually get back to the bad guys who are even worse by then, their deaths are rather anticlimactic. History sucks, man. It just does.

I guess, if going to see this hoping it was a vigilante film has taught me anything, it's that I have a lot more Tarantinoesque-revisionist sympathy in me than I care to admit. Because I was really looking forward to a Nightingale-Unchained Aboriginal-Irish team-up bloodbath where they take down all the redcoats until they destroy the biggest and baddest ones in a blaze of satisfying righteousness.

And what I got was some sad songs by the sea, about islands and Irelands and all the wrongs done to both their people.

J* gives it 3 stars.

PS. They spend most of the film on the way to Lon-ston (Launceston -third alt-pronunciation).

PPS. It's a historic drama, stupid.

PPS. If you like historic drama and can do brutal bits, you'll probably like it more than me. But like, that seems like a niche? A lot of people in the audience were making very upset noises about the brutality and clearly they were only used to the mild-level of such things. Maybe this is one of those gateway films that takes the usual historical drama crowd and brings them to the beginning of vigilante? If it was meant to gateway me from vigilante to historic drama it didn't.