The Current Cinema - Overwhelming mayhem unleashed in BY ANY MEANS (Elegance Bratton, USA, 2026)

Spoiler alert. The whole plot is given away

OK. First start with the last. At the end of By Any Means there are forty five people credited as producers, executive producers, co-executive producers and co-producers. There is also a person credited as “Associate Producer”. With all that creative input how could anything go wrong.

 

I don’t suppose it does in a way. There are parallel openings to the movie. First we see Marc Wahlberg taking a baseball bat to a man who is tied up, battered and bruised. Wahlberg, playing gangster Greg Scarpa, wants names of the battered man’s criminal associates. He gives them up and Wahlberg continues to lay into him with the baseball bat. OK…we’ve got the message he’s a cold-blooded sadist as well as everything else we’ll discover about him. It took a moment to recognise Wahlberg because here he sports a rather prominent false nose. If you follow it, it's been on the online low-rent media for over a year.…

 

Cut to  an African American in a suit walking down a corridor.  We learn he’s an FBI Agent and quickly discover he’s a token black guy. He’s sidelined and ignored.  We learn that in the days when and where the movie is set, 1960s Mississippi, since the FBI was created a half a century or more ago, there have been barely a couple of handfuls of black FBI Agents. Agent Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II)  has asked for a transfer to an office in the south where he is treated mostly with disdain and not allocated any meaningful detective work. He wants to take on the Ku Klux Klan but it’s not until the regional FBI manager, in some desperation, decides that he’s going to play fast and loose that things start to happen.  Scarpa has a sideline as a fixer for the FBI when all else fails. He and Strider are given the job to find the KKK killers of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer. Then the mayhem really starts. 

 

Scarpa is a psychopath. After the initial bashing, in case you weren’t convinced he might have an evil streak, he shoots a traffic cop for basically no reason at all.  Then a series of extremely violent scenes take place until some kind of honour is finally served. Scarpa goes back to his criminal life in New Jersey and Strider accepts you have to make compromises to bring some people to some kind of justice. That’s it…. another film that’s inspired by true American events…

Streaming on SBS On Demand - Barrie Pattison stumbles across REALITY (Tina Satter, USA, 2023)

 

Sydney Sweeney as Reality Winner, Reality

Reality is very much a movie of the moment. It features rising star Sydney Sweeney (of the Jeans Commercial furore) and puts her up as a Trump era whistle blower. 

The twenty five year old real life subject, who is genuinely named Reality Winner, was ex-military,  working as N.S.A. translator because of her Farsi and Pashto language skills (we never do find out about that) while waiting for her military deployment. 

We watch as FBI agents arrive on her suburban tract home lawn, producing a search warrant.  The exchange is subtly unnatural,  with her taking it all calmly and their questioning casual. Agent Marchánt Davis jokes about having  three guns in the house being like his own home. They load her groceries into the fridge and help round up her pets but they are quick to keep her from handling her cell phone and make a point of calling in someone so she is never alone with one of them. It builds menace.

The team get down to work in the empty back room - “if you want to sit on the floor.”  The spectre of Edward Snowden hovers. Josh Hamilton’s agent re-assures “I don’t think you’re a big bad master spy.” Gradually incriminating detail is worked into the exchanges (the leaked document was folded once) while she denies the suggestion that she took documents off her business premises - classified information which may be of value to the enemy.

The film works up interest as an exact transcription of the interrogation recordings. I hate to think of the billable hours studio legal put in on checking. It comes complete with action to match noises-off and jump cuts and pixel splash to account for redacted material or switch offs. First feature writer-director Tina Satter had already staged this as a theatre piece. The minimalist form is opened out by glimpses of the Augusta Georgia neighbourhood where Sweeny/Reality Winter waits for her proposed active service - electric wiring poles, fenced yards, bare streets whose residents probably drive there from their day jobs. The final pull back from the red tile roofs is a resonant comment. This calm gets to be disrupted by jagged news clip montages that flash the James Comey dismissal, Fox News, Bill Maher.  We sense world events funnelling down into this unremarkable location.

The film’s laid-back approach doesn’t hide where their sympathies lie and, with minimal help from makeup and costuming, Sweeney is faced with the most demanding role of her beginner career. She aces the vulnerable, conflicted, winning, and finally justified (Senate Hearing) character. Equalling this one will now be her challenge.

The film certainly deserves more than being buried in the SBS schedule. Though I spend more time than I like breaking that down each week, I only chanced on Reality because it came on after Adam Elliot’s endearing Mary & Max. Close call.

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For an earlier report by Rod Bishop following the film's screening at the 2023 Sydney Film Festival click here