The Legend of Molly Johnson: Mama's Got a Shotgun and a Double-Barrelled Message
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C
Good stories, like all-night diners, always stay open.
Consider the bountiful 1892 story, The Drover’s Wife, a sketch of a few pages written by a 25-year-old Henry Lawson, about an isolated mother in an outback hut, staying up all night with her dog waiting for a snake to emerge from under her floorboards.
Australians can’t stop finding new ways to retell it. The late Australian writer Frank Moorhouse - who described the story as “an artistic phenomenon unique in the Australian imagination” - assembled the 2017 anthology, The Drover’s Wife: A Collection, exploring the many variations of the story, along with interpretative essays.
You don’t mess around with Molly (Leah Purcell).
There is a graphic novel that reimagines the story 99 different ways, and a version of the story from the perspective of the woman’s dog, Alligator.
Now Australian Indigenous actor-director Leah Purcell (Lantana, the TV series Wentworth) brings us her directorial debut, The Legend of Molly Johnson, inspired by Lawton’s story. She has previously produced the work as a play in 2016 and published it as a novel in 2019, exploring the tale of a pioneer mother’s hardship through a feminist and post-colonial lens.
Set against the grand landscapes of the Snowy Mountains region of southern New South Wales, The Legend of Molly Johnson is also a crime story. It features an Aboriginal fugitive on the run and Purcell as the titular Molly, a badass middle-aged mama protecting her children and home with a shotgun, while her mysterious husband is away on an interminable sheep drive.
Molly, heavily pregnant, establishes her fierceness early when a rogue steer blunders into her yard, threatening to harm her four kids. After she blasts the animal, she has a disturbing flashback of some similar experience, and then begins preparing its meat for her family’s dinner.
The smell of the cooking beef brings the first of a series of troublesome strangers to her remote hut. They include an English couple, a new policeman Nate Clintoff (Sam Reid) heading to his first assignment in the nearby town of Everton, along his wife, Louisa (Jessica De Gouw), an aspiring journalist with a focus on spousal abuse.
After Molly establishes their credentials and good will, she accepts their offer to temporarily take her children to nearby relatives to nearby Everton, while she waits out her pregnancy.
Everton is a classic frontier town of prostitutes, clergymen, toothless bad guys and livestock dealers.
Nate soon finds himself with a murder case on his hands. Around the same time, Yadaka (Rob Collins), an Aboriginal man with a chain around his neck, shows up in the yard.
His crime? “Existing whilst Black,” he says, anachronistically.
While Molly is deciding whether to shoot him, her water breaks and she goes into labour. Yadaka provides help and, in exchange, she gives him food and shelter and they share stories, including a secret about her birth.
Purcell makes for an original Western figure, a worn-out, fed up woman in a big hat and a shotgun, who’s had all the abuse she can take. She convincingly spits out threats like: “I’ll shoot you where you stand and bury you where you fall.”
Molly proves she has a tender side and not just for her brood of kids. Scenes depicting her growing relationship with Yadaka, in a mutual journey of discovery that is more sibling than romantic, are among the film’s most appealing.
On the whole, The Legend of Molly Johnson is the sort of film you wish you could like better if it weren’t forcing its interpretation so hard. Behind the memorable visuals of Molly with a shotgun, the mountain vistas and emphatic strings and piano score, the film is encumbered by its agenda.
Plot revelations are clumsily foreshadowed, secondary characters are one dimensional. Much of it feels like an illustrated lesson plan, checking off points about a history of racist laws, stolen children and gender violence. All this is wrapped up in a melodramatic conclusion so didactic, it’s feels as though it should include a public address announcement and a hotline.
Purcell’s performance and ambition in reframing this foundational Australian tale are admirable. But her version of the story would be more resonant if it held more mystery and less message.
The Legend of Molly Johnson. Directed and written by Leah Purcell. Starring: Leah Purcell, Rob Collins, Sam Reid and Jessica Gouw. The Legend of Molly Johnson will be available on VOD on Aug. 19.