Vale Lee Tamahori (The Convert (2023)). Perhaps my third time around with his classic take on what it meant to be Māori in the latter half of the twentieth century. Riwia Brown adapted Alan Duff's novel of the same name from 1990. The cast is perfect. It now also functions as a time capsule of Auckland and surrounds.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. He didn't grasp any cultural specifities or comment on the cinematic aspects. Janet Maslin: she grasped more of the details but still produced some clangers. I guess international audiences latch onto the universals — the dispossession, the love and domestic violence, the alcoholism, the wayward children, etc. — and miss the carefully constructed nuances. For instance we're shown at least five versions of the overhang of traditional Māori cultural practice, of which one seems to endorse the removal of children from families and another the impossibility of social and economic mobility. Strangely absent were the All Blacks.
