The Outlaw Michael Howe

Different people want different things from films; I like to be entertained.

Bereft of real narrative the old tactic of huge sweeping panoramas of wilderness have been employed to manipulate the audience in The Outlaw Michael Howe. Conversely, the film Jindabyne used landscape to great effect and for my sensibilities raised difficult questions around contemporary morality and managed to be entertaining; proving landscapes and good story need not be mutually exclusive.

The title is a play on the Clint Eastwood Western, The Outlaw Josey Wales which is a story that does explore characters, however unapologetic titles playing on well made previously successful 40+ year old films had better deliver. This film isn't one of those (as if you can't tell from the title).

The hatred of authority by the protagonist is one dimensional. The rag tag gang members seem boring, but unlike the aforementioned Western, are just actors looking like a gang. Apparently the community liked Michael Howe but you get no sense of it until you see them cheering, patting him on the back and a few obligatory kids in awe of him. Until that point I thought the community loathed him.

The man was an animal, treated badly by animals and was a product of his time. There is so much material here especially for the amateur psychologist but this was mostly explored in graphic violence and a few tokenistic gestures about falling in love with "The Place." This is supposed to elude to his humanity (oh the humanity!) and human complexity. The film Jindabyne is a film with a potentially less interesting story than Michael Howe, but that film leaves you with a sense of uneasiness because of the well told thought provoking and complex storyline which studies the characters and values of modern times. That's how you tell a story.

I have little doubt that Michael Howe is an interesting character in early Australian history, however gratuitous violence of the time can be conveyed through other means than the way in which it was dealt. A few years ago a one or two part film was made for TV on William Buckley, who was a contemporary of Michael Howe. Buckley was an 1803 convict escapee not too far from Howe as it turns out. That film/docudrama was interesting and entertaining; struggles in Buckley's life revolved around food, shelter, water, aborigines, snakes, the climate, language, two conflicting cultures, women and of course inevitable power struggles. You don't get much depth in the Outlaw Michael Howe.

Some may like the film; I might as well just have read a Wikipedia entry on Michael Howe.

A visually interesting film but ultimately B grade. There are some good parts to the film, but mostly it is not in the area of character development.

One good thing is, it is fairly short.

What's there to say about Michael Howe? He was a Bushranger, an Outlaw if Colonial Australia, in Van Dieman's Land (Tasmania) actually. Back in the late 1700s and early 1800s it was brutal colony where the most notorious of convicts were sent and served out their time, however the landscape was dominated by vast forests making it almost impossible to navigate easily. Howe was one of the many Bushranges in this region and era who fledged his own civil war against the colonial authorities along with a large gang of Bushrangers or Bolters (escaped convicts). Like many other Bushrangers across Australia, Howe fought for his own right for freedom in a land where every man's opportunity was one he could make and due to his unruly exploits challenged the then unapologetic and unrealized Law of Van Dieman's Land.

This TV-movie directed well known Australian writer/actor and director; Brendan Cowell is beautifully photographed, well acted, visually astonishing and incredibly authentic in it's appearance. While Michael Howe was a big Bushranger name in Tasmania it certainly fills in the gaps to which Bushrangers in Australia's history haven't been brought to film. It's fascinating in it's subject matter, where an isolated colony at the bottom of the world is at war with a man who became clever devious and almost legendary in his exploits against British rule. Settlers are desperate to either catch him themselves or be toppled by this outlaw who the press named the 'Governor of the Ranges'.

What viewers understand about Howe's character is there's a big complexity to why he did what he did. He was at odds with his friends and enemies, including his wife 'Black' Mary an Aboriginal woman who believed in him and who he supposedly had a child with (not too sure if that's historically accurate).

It's certainly one of the best looking, and well performed colonial drama I have seen on the Australian screen in a long time. I can't think of anything else to compare it too, since it's one of the very few films to be made on Michael Howe and a definitive version at that. If you love films or TV shows about Bushranging, this is one of the very best and unique of the genre, and is highly recommended as an essential piece of Colonial Australia as seen on screen.