Philip Matthews suffers the film version of Owen Marshall's short story Coming Home in the Dark
It’s always worth sitting through the credits. If you stay to the very end of James Ashcroft’s tense and brutal new Kiwi thriller Coming Home in the Dark, past the lists of who played who and who did what, you will see a short dedication from Ashcroft. It’s just three words: “For Our Brothers”.
But which brothers? Who does he mean? There are brothers in the film, twins who are shot quickly and without sentimentality at the site of a family picnic by the killer Mandrake — the boys are called Mark and Gordon in Owen Marshall’s original short story and Maika and Jordan in Ashcroft and Eli Kent’s adaptation. But it isn’t them. Once they are gone from the film, the twins are largely gone from the memory of viewers and perhaps even the characters — there is just too much going on in the moment. They were sacrificial lambs. No, the brothers are the thousands of New Zealand men who were abused in boys’ homes and state care in the 1960s and 70s, and whose stories are only emerging into wider consciousness now. This makes an adaptation of a short story from 1995 surprisingly topical.
Yet it also changes the meaning of Marshall’s story and shifts its perspective, in ways that don’t seem to me to improve it. To explain why, we need to go back to the start and talk about what it is that made, and continues to make, Marshall’s story so powerful and shocking.
In a way, the story is very simple. Death comes out of nowhere on a fine, clear day. Hoaggie and Jill and their two boys are enjoying their picnic after a walk up the Hooker Valley near Aoraki Mt Cook (“the defiant angles and peaks, the low alpine vegetation, the mutual touch of bright sun and sweet, cold breeze”), when they are interrupted by two men. There is the thin, pale, talkative Mandrake with his long, mulish face and there is the quiet, heavy-set Tub with “the features of his full face seeming indented like those of a snowman”. They are little and large, almost like a comic duo or a frontman and his sidekick, but what they represent is violence at its most random, meaningless and pitiless.
They shoot the boys, they eat the food and they bundle Hoaggie and Jill back into their own car, a Volvo, and they set off, just as night is falling. The roads that Marshall describes, around Lake Pukaki, Tekapo and towards Burke’s Pass, are typically empty of other cars for long stretches. As they drive, Mandrake talks and talks, relaying his homemade outsider philosophy, his sense that the world is indifferent to us, and his belief that he has seen through all the illusions: “Nothing connects me with it except bringing it down,” he explains, as he keeps driving Hoaggie’s car through the dark, occasionally glancing at the owner captive in the backseat. “That’s all an outsider has, you see. What the books call a negative capability.”
Jill’s constant crying distracts Mandrake from his deep thoughts, so she is shot too, as quickly and unceremoniously as the boys were, and her body is dumped in a ditch by the side of the road. Now there is just Mandrake, Tub and Hoaggie.
I once rang Owen Marshall and asked what it all meant. He was very patient, considering the banality of the question (he had been a high school teacher, so he surely dealt with worse). While it was fiction, he said it was inspired by reports of home invasions that he kept reading in newspapers. He said: “There might be a nice old lady just sitting there having a Horlicks and then someone on P decides that this is a door I’ll bash in, strangles her and eats her bacon and eggs. The theme of the story was the random senselessness of violence. So I set it in a lovely, scenic, quiet place to accentuate the impact of that terrible violence.”
There is something interesting in this: not just the indignity of the killing, but the added indignity of the monster then devouring the food. In Marshall’s anecdote, it is the nice old lady’s bacon and eggs. In his short story, it’s the neenish tarts, sultana muffins and bacon and egg pie Jill had spread across the tartan picnic rug, scoffed by a hungry Tub.
Marshall’s short story, and its evocative and ominous title, became a fluid metaphor. The Christchurch Art Gallery put on a major show called Coming Home in the Dark in 2004. “Moider, mayhem and muffins,” the press release said, referring to the spelling of murder preferred by teenage killers Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, with their fantasies about American crime stories. You already know about the muffins. The premise of the show was that art by such hometown luminaries as Ronnie van Hout, Jason Greig and Barry Cleavin expressed a shadowy truth about Canterbury and the darkness that seethed beneath its pleasant, fake-English exterior. Seventeen years later, after the earthquakes and the mosque attacks, those Gothic fixations seem less relevant, or part of an old Christchurch that only really exists in memories.
Marshall didn’t think there was anything specific to Canterbury about the kind of murders he described in his story “Coming Home in the Dark”. They can happen anywhere, and often do. The what is more important than the where. (So maybe it shouldn’t matter too much that Ashcroft has moved the story from the scenic South Island to scrubby hills north of Wellington.) There are no obvious motivations in this killing spree, no mitigating backstory, no sense of a past or a future, no proper names for the killers. It is opportunistic violence without meaning or justification, and there is a way in which there is something particularly 1990s about that. Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games appeared around the same time, featuring two amoral thrill-killers who torment a family, while implicating viewers in their sadism and asking them to think about why they enjoy watching violence, but that was only the most self-aware film in a decade awash with ultraviolence (see also: Wild at Heart, Reservoir Dogs, American Psycho, Man Bites Dog, Romper Stomper, La Haine, I Stand Alone, Natural Born Killers, Seven and other films that prompted a thousand “has cinema finally gone too far?” think pieces.)
Any adaptation of “Coming Home in the Dark” was going to come up against two big problems. The first is that meaningless killings committed by entirely unsympathetic killers are a hard sell outside of genre films (you hear of people putting the book down in shock or disgust when the murders start, which is like filmgoers walking out of movies). The second is that there isn’t enough story to justify even 90 minutes. But in opening up the story to get it to feature length, Ashcroft and Kent have watered down its power and even contradicted its themes.
There is no question that it is a technically well-made thriller, and that Ashcroft is a skilled director of action, adroitly assisted by cinematographer Matt Henley. Daniel Gillies is actorly as Mandrake, but not too actorly. The striking-looking Matthias Luafutu is very natural as Tub, now renamed Tubs, even if he doesn’t resemble the bulky figure in the story. Erik Thomson and Miriama McDowell are impressive as the suffering Hoaggie and Jill. A couple of these names tell you about another significant change, which is the racial dimension. The original story was entirely Pākehā and the reader pictured Mandrake and Tub as the kind of white trash miscreants you wouldn’t have been too surprised to encounter on South Canterbury backroads. By contrast, Jill and her twins are Māori in this film, and Tubs is played by a Samoan actor, leaving Thomson’s Hoaggie and Gillies’ Mandrake, the two chief antagonists, as the film’s white men. As Ashcroft is himself Māori, this complicating of the racial make-up of the story is clearly not accidental, but nor is it properly explored.
The movie’s Mandrake isn’t quite the philosopher that Marshall created, although he is gifted a nice monologue from the story, about getting stoned and looking at the stars from a boat that rocks on the water, that suggests a more contemplative Mandrake (“It always seems to me that the sky is closer when you’re out on the water,” he muses). His appearance also implies that he is a different kind of figure from the physically unremarkable killer in the story. His coat, his boots, his belt buckle, the way he carries his gun: the movie’s Mandrake is styled as an anti-hero from a western, an avenging man with no name.
And “avenging” is the key word there. The backstory that Ashcroft and Kent developed has Mandrake and Tubs as survivors of a boys’ home. There are flashbacks (a mistake) to moments of humiliation on the old playgrounds and in classrooms. And they turn Hoaggie into a teacher who happened to do some of his training at one of those institutions. What a coincidence. Worse, he was a bystander who witnessed some abuse and did nothing.
Ashcroft has his own interest in this stuff. He has said that he and two of the film’s producers had relatives who were in those institutions, and that he has met some of the teachers from such places, “who really challenged my faith in humanity”. It’s telling that as well as optioning two Marshall stories (the other is “The Rule of Jenny Pen”) and David Ballantyne’s classic novel Sydney Bridge Upside Down, the busy Ashcroft also produced an adaptation of David Cohen’s book about Epuni Boys’ Home, Little Criminals. The boys from these places are the “brothers” in Ashcroft’s dedication.
This means that Mandrake is no longer a cold-hearted killer, a blank force of nature or an expression of the world’s terrifying indifference to our suffering and absence of meaning. Instead, he is a damaged child with a gun, a victim desperate for payback. And Hoaggie? He’s no longer an innocent man, as guiltless as the little old lady with her cup of Horlicks. He’s now implicated in the systematic abuse of thousands of kids and is at least partly deserving of the punishments dealt out to him. But two points of view are in conflict in Coming Home in the Dark, and they fight to the death: there is Marshall’s view that sometimes bad things simply happen to good people, and there is Ashcroft’s view that there is no such thing as good people or bad people, just shades of grey. The short story, with its unexpected clash between evil and blamelessness, its chilling fatalism, remains more powerful and mysterious than the movie, with its mitigating arguments for the defence.
The short story "Coming Home in the Dark" is included in the recently published collection The Author's Cut by Owen Marshall (Vintage, $36), and the story "The Rule of Jenny Pen", which James Ashcroft has optioned to make into a film, is included in the new edition of the 1989 anthology Six by Six edited by Bill Manhire (Victoria University Press, $40), featuring six stories by Marshall, Patricia Grace, Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, Maurice Duggan, and Janet Frame. Both books are available in bookstores nationwide, or will be whenever bookstores are reopened. The film Coming Home in the Dark is playing in cinemas nationwide, or will be whenever cinemas are reopened.
