This article first appeared in The Australian, 4 June 2009

Review of the film Samson and Delilah

Hon. Dr Gary Johns

The critics have wet themselves over Samson and Delilah, the film by Aboriginal director Warwick Thornton, which won the Camera d'Or at the Cannes film festival. The critics and a good many patrons thought that it was optimistic. A typical review was, "It will leave hearts bruised, but aching with joy." Joy?

Apparently, Samson and Delilah is a love story. In the closing scenes, two Aboriginal teenagers---Samson and Delilah---run away from Aboriginal and white society to live on her country. They get there in a four-wheel-drive. She unpacks tinned food, she shoots a 'roo and sets up home in an abandoned tin shack among the remnants of a cattle station. She starts up the windmill and fills the water trough, she washes him, she sits him in his wheelchair and she contemplates her dot painting. End of story.

Well, what happens on day two?

Come on, this is nonsense. Abandoning children is exactly what the romantics among the film set are doing when they praise this film as optimistic. This is precisely the mindset that led to the outstation movement 40 years ago.

The Aborigines gave up because, says the mother of the young actor who played Samson and who lives on the fringes of Alice Springs: "It's too hard to live in town, in housing; the white people complain. My brothers come around here and smash things and I can't stop them."

H.C. "Nugget" Coombs, too, thought it would be good if Aborigines could escape life by living on country.

This is Jenny Macklin's challenge when she moves the bulldozers into the town camps at Alice Springs and builds suburbs. Can people who shunned white society 40 years ago to live on welfare change bad habits?

The film industry just does not want to know the nasty truth at the heart of Aboriginal politics this film, perhaps unwittingly, has uncovered. The film brutally portrays the absolute degradation of behaviour and norms in Aboriginal society and that escaping the stringencies of white society is no solution. The critics' optimism is cruelly misplaced. Film buffs are escapists, but Aboriginal children cannot hide from society, indeed they often willingly embrace the bad parts of it. Our liberal-minded critics just cannot grow up. This is not the '60s, there is no alternative in the desert. If you think so, just ask Samson and Delilah.

The film opens with a typical day in Samson's life. He wakes to reggae music from his brother's band playing on the porch of the archetypal concrete box house. He sniffs a can of petrol. There's nothing to do, no work, no school. Instead, Samson follows young Delilah around as she cares for her grandmother. He is clearly taken with her, but cannot or will not say so. Instead, Samson throws stones at Delilah to catch her attention.

The next day, Samson whacks a band member over the head with a lump of wood, and in retaliation his brother beats him senseless. Samson takes his filthy rubber mat and blanket across the road and camps outside Delilah's concrete box. Delilah's grandmother dies, Delilah is beaten by other women in punishment for the death; the two steal a four-wheel-drive and head for town. In town Delilah is kidnapped by youths, possibly raped and certainly beaten. Nevertheless, the next day she returns to Samson who has taken shelter under the bridge on a dry river bed. He did not think to look for her. Next day, they wander out into traffic and she is run down. He did not think to look for her. The ambulance people return her, patched up.

One critic said it was "one of the bravest Australian films I've ever seen". And so it was, as a documentary. Except in one respect: Delilah enters a church (suspiciously like the John Flynn church in Alice Springs) and then wanders out under the stern eye of a clergyman, who offers no help. If this is meant to convey a message about the missions, it fails. The missions saved more than souls in outback Australia, they saved lives.

Thornton says: "As far as telling a story that's realistic, I needed to go all the way and not hold back on how grim things are. Most 14-year-olds in Alice are walking around with the knowledge of a 90-year-old, from what they've experienced. They're bulletproof."

No they are not, they are traumatised and despondent.

Any answers, Warwick? How did you escape? What is your optimistic story? How did you learn to read and write? Do you live on country, totally dependent on the white man's petrol and canned food?

Another critic wrote "(A) celebration of the resilience and nurturing power of womankind." For goodness' sake, the kid was hopeless, he pushed into her life (approved by the grandmother, no doubt with memories of her own youth) and bludged off her. No self-respecting feminist could applaud the film.

Samson and Delilah continues the myth of escape, puts off the day when Samson and Delilah must be schooled in the way of living in the real world, far from the romance of the film world.