The film takes place near the end of the Boer War (1899–1902), which was fought between British forces and the mostly Dutch Boers over control of South Africa. When the film begins, the British forces have taken control of the country, but there are still numerous skirmishes with Boer guerrilla forces composed mostly of non-uniformed farmers. This is the first time the British have dealt with such tactics, so they create the Bushveldt Carbineers, a special force geared toward fighting guerrilla warfare with the same.

After a controversial episode in which six Boer captives are executed and a German missionary is mysteriously killed, Lord Kitchener (Alan Cassell), the highest ranking British officer, comes under pressure from Germany, who is threatening to enter the war on the Boer side. In order to deflect that pressure, he uses the episode to make scapegoats out of three Australian members of the Bushveldt Carbineers: Lt. Harry Morant (Edward Woodward), Lt. Peter Handcock (Bryan Brown), and Lt. George Witton (Lewis Fitz-Gerald).

Morant, nicknamed “Breaker” for his ability to tame horses, assumed leadership of the Bushveldt Carbineers after the brutal killing of its previous leader, Capt. Simon Hunt (Terence Donovan), at the hands of the Boers. Dragged in front of a court-martial, the three men are accused of massacring Boer prisoners as reprisal for Hunt’s death. The attorney for the accused, Major J.F. Thomas (Jack Thompson), an inexperienced but determined Australian, proves numerous times that the orders to kill the prisoners came from the top, from no less than Lord Kitchener himself, but to no avail. The three men are political pawns, and the trial has nothing whatsoever to do with justice.

Despite the fact that the majority of the film takes place in a courtroom, the primary theme that emerges in Breaker Morant is the ugly, uncontrolled nature of war itself. The film shows how terms such as “war crimes,” “rules of war,” and “civilized warfare” are, at best, essentially meaningless—war is, in and of itself, ruthless and lawless, and such terms can too easily be coopted and manipulated to serve a political agenda. In its most mordant moments, when the obviousness of the trial’s travesty of justice is almost unbearable, the film brings to mind Martin Sheen’s infamous line in Apocalypse Now (1979): “Charging a man with murder in this place is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.”Of course, he was referring to the situation in Vietnam, but his words are powerfully applicable to Breaker Morant since war is war, whether it’s being fought in Southeast Asia or South Africa. As a matter of fact, it will be difficult for anyone—especially Americans—to watch this film without relating it to Vietnam (the film was released just five years after U.S. forces pulled out of Saigon, so the connection then would have been even stronger). The scenario in the Boer War was essentially the same: a superior force in terms of both numbers and technology being systematically defeated by a small group of guerrilla fighters. Several times during the film, characters refer to the fact that they are essentially fighting farmers, women, and children, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to tell who is the enemy and who is not.

And that is what makes this kind of warfare, new to the British army at the time, so difficult. As Morant points out during the court-martial, the point of war is to kill as many of the enemy as possible, which is exactly what he and the others did. But, because it was politically advantageous to make them scapegoats, the context of their actions was stripped away, rendering them simply murderous. It has only been in recent years, with the advent of technology and refined manners, that humanity has been silly enough to conceive of the notion of established rules for killing the enemy. And Breaker Morant makes the point that those human-mandated rules are inherently flexible, but only so that they serve those in power. The irony is never so thick as during a scene in the middle of the film when the Boers attack the fort where the men are being held and court-martialed. Soldiers release them from their cells, hand them guns, and order them to kill the attacking Boers, which they do with great skill and aplomb. When the skirmish is over, we get a shock cut directly to the next scene where they are once again being tried for murder and the president of the court is railing about the irrelevance of what we have just seen.

Breaker Morant was directed by Bruce Beresford, who along with Peter Weir, Philip Noyce, and George Miller, was an integral part of the Australian film renaissance of the 1970s and early ’80s. Beresford had directed five feature films and a handful of television movies in Australia, but he was largely unknown outside the country before Breaker Morant, which became Australia’s highest grossing film and swept the Australian Academy Awards (Beresford’s explanation for its enormous success in his home country was that “The Australians have never really seen their history on the screen before”). His screenplay, which was based on an earlier draft for a television movie by Jonathan Hardy and David Stevens, that was in turn loosely based on Kenneth Ross’s play of the same title, was nominated for an Oscar, and Beresford was quickly brought into the Hollywood fold, where he directed the popular and critically lauded hits Tender Mercies (1983), which netted Robert Duvall a Best Actor Oscar, and Driving Miss Daisy (1989), which won four Oscars, including Best Picture.

It is not hard to see why Hollywood came calling. Breaker Morant is an expertly and tautly directed film. Beresford infuses the courtroom proceedings with tension, wit, and drama, making the film a worthy successor to Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1960) and a forerunner to Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men (1992). He and cinematographer Donald McAlpine, who also went on to a lengthy Hollywood career, employ deep focus and a variety of camera angles to make the proceedings both visually interesting and aesthetically meaningful (the decision to flatten space so that opposing characters in the foreground and background appear to be occupying the same plane helps increase the tension between them). Beresford also gives his outstanding actors time and space to turn their characters into memorable humans. Morant’s hard-nosed honor and refusal to be broken, Handcock’s caustic sarcasm and sly wit, Witton’s youthful fear of early death, and Thomas’s increasing sense of moral outrage are expertly rendered both in the courtroom and during flashbacks of the actual events.

Beresford does a fine job pacing the film, allowing fragments of the story to emerge as the film unfolds, but never allowing it to bog down into overly melodramatic courtroom antics. Even though the real-life story was, prior to the film, little more than a blip on the historical register (most Australians were unaware of who Breaker Morant was at the time), Beresford recognized its universal insight into war and politics, and he relays it as a gripping story about believable characters in a well-established time and place while also probing crucial themes that are essentially timeless. As long as humanity persists, there will be war, and Breaker Morant makes it clear that war always has been and always will be an ugly matter that cannot be dealt with in civilized terms. The physical battles of war may kill men on the battlefield, but it is the backroom politics that often make casualties of otherwise honorable men who, due to their circumstances, have to make terrible choices—in the words of Major Thomas in his closing argument, “normal men in abnormal circumstances.”

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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