And I pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
These immortal lines from T. S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday open Tim Winton's collection of short stories penned in 2004, seventeen tales which circle the small, Western Australian town of Angelus. The anthology concerns a handful of recurring characters and families which dip in and out of the narrative across generations and time periods, but which always return to that beach-side setting. More so than brothers Max and Frank, Rae the single mother, Bob the policeman, Bob the drunk, sober Bob, Strawberry Alison, Gail, and Vic Lang as a boy, teenager, son, and lawyer, Angelus becomes a character in and of itself, the lurking shadows of the outback, the salty surf and spray, and the rusted roofs of the local fibro shacks as much a constant in these stories as its inhabitants are. They are defined by the rural location as much as they are defined by what they make of their lives after departure.
If there is a definitive effect of the 2013 filmic adaptation, it is that it stresses the achievements of Winton's narrative voices. His prose alternates between different perspectives and is strictly confined to that of a masculine worldview, even when told from the point-of-view of their female counterparts, but there is a consistency in their unspoken yearning that can only truly be verbalised through internal narration. Voiceover simply doesn't cut it. One of the poster children for this, the opening story in 'Big World', sees the unnamed narrator come to a gradual recognition that his high school best friend is destined to spend the rest of his days salmon trawling on the shores of Angelus, and what's worse, is content to do so. Yet Thornton compresses this realisation into an afterthought dispersed over a mere ten minutes of clipped voiceover, lines lazily spooled out over a few impressionistic moments of their mateship - in slow motion, no less. The visuals confine what imagination we might ascribe to the final, fatal flashforward that he experiences in envisioning reciting Robert Louis Stevenson at Biggie's funeral, his relatives uncomfortable shifting over a reference beyond their working-class roots. What might our lives look like in a year, in five, in ten? The short extinguishes that, but not in the same agonising manner that Winton did, freezing time as three teenagers are enveloped by the enormity of the wide world that awaits them.
Similar disconnections plague the other shorts because of this switch in form. Winton's often-nested flashbacks necessitate that we imagine different versions of these characters both within a story and across the anthology, but through the separate productions and casts we are forced to contend with shifting faces and isolated in physical locations. 'Damaged Goods' is clever in its attempt to address this temporal dislocation by segmenting the frame into different sections, one for Gail's probe into her husband's past through dusty old photos, and the other for the actual memories. But ultimately it's little more than a visual gimmick; Lucas can't genuinely replicate the sense of lost time and longing, even with that prophetic opening sentence, and even resorts to needing to show Gail's eyes darting back and forth in close-up as the final image of the short, as if the audience couldn't grasp the epiphany themselves. There's no sense of her existing beyond those frames (which, in a way, is a limitation of Winton's focalisation as well). 'Aquifer' must expel literal tears from its adult protagonist for a similar narrative purpose.
It's unsurprising, then, that one of the more coherent stories is so because of the tale's inherent interiority, where Vic and Bob Lang reunite in 'Commission'. The original short is perhaps the only one of Winton's that might be considered a tad overwritten; the filmic form's limitations are appropriate here because two men tangled up in trauma are withdrawn and reticent by nature. Their clipped dialogue and subtle body language do more to tell the story than any internal monologue ever could. The premise rests on the idea of untold words too late to be uttered, and the spaces that exist in-between their conversations; if anything, parts of their delivery are somewhat rushed. Their story's tragic irony is having all the time in the world and nothing to fill it with. The final shot is pitch-perfect in its lingering silence: a man both entrusted and coerced with secrets. Nothing more needs to be said. We know Bob Lang for who he was, and who he is.
Some of these stories, conversely, are content (or perhaps, constrained) to end on a note of ambiguity, such is the sparseness of their imagery and narration. It's as if the film stock abruptly ran out, and the audience are left to surmise what might haunt these characters beyond these moments. 'Small Mercies' and 'Fog' excise the symbolic 'turns' of their original stories to close on almost arbitrary notes, and 'Long, Clear View' guts the rich tension of a young Vic Lang's backstory for a whimsical take on his childhood. Swapping the distinctive second-person narration for neat visual metaphors where the camera stares down the barrel of a rifle or through his glasses, the short is tonally cohesive but dilutes an important chapter of connective tissue joining the tragic arcs of father and son. These endings succeed best when they are uncompromising in their presentation; Rae's titular 'turning' is birthed when she fantasises of Jesus Christ shrouded in angelic light as a way of shielding herself from an ugly reality. Her character is brimming with Angelus vernacular and rural flavour, and this final shot is a bold creative decision, resolute storytelling to match the uniquely dark twist of her fate. Because McCarthy's direction is assured (and how important a female director is here), the audience is made assured of Rae's own choice, something remarkably difficult to accept when we are used to being conventionally positioned from the saviour's perspective in Sherry.
The most eye-catching of them all is 'Boner McPharlin's Moll', which must be commended for actually drawing on the strengths of its medium rather than simply replicating the third-person format of Winton. In this way, its inventiveness builds on the premise of the original story, which fills in some (but not all) of the gaps of the life of Boner McPharlin, a small-time crook suspected of falling foul of the corrupt police force from which Bob Lang fled. Rather than fixate on one female protagonist's curiosity (the ostensible 'saviour'), Kurtzel turns the roving camera towards the residents of Angelus, layering his imagery with snippets of interviews to gradually trace the outline of a person through hearsay and small-town speculation. A penultimate shot inches its way toward a spectral figure with his back turned to the camera, as visually arresting as it is impenetrable. Whilst it does cut out much of the backstory of the anthology's longest piece, Kurtzel has achieved a rare thing by elevating the tale beyond one of mere human misunderstanding, imprinting the ghost of Boner McPharlin into the fabric of Angelus itself. His interpretation is then, ironically, the most faithful to Winton's tapestry of the Western Australian milieu. If there's anything novel to be gained after reading the original, it is in this segment.
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