Jeremy Sims’s Rams, starring Sam Neill and Michael Catton, is strangely apropos for our time: a film about a sheep pandemic that tears apart a town and, maybe, mends a broken family. After Hunt for the Wilderpeople, I am generally pro any movie with a grumpy Sam Neill resisting the tide of time, and so I had high expectations about shenanigans and decades-long feuds and how they would play out on the farm, but as it turns out Rams is much more about organizing a set of circumstances that force a reunion than squeezing comedy out of the two brothers’ frayed relationship. Yes, there are scenes that demonstrate the vastness of the gap between them, but for the most part, it feels somewhat abusive and murdery. Les is abusing alcohol and neglecting his flock badly enough to contract a deadly disease that spreads to the others. I have to assume the science is out on how the disease spreads, but it’s surprising to me that despite the fact that Les’s sheep is Patient Zero in Plantagenet, he’s not ostracized (any more than he already was) from the community.
There are a few romantic arcs that are set up in this movie, but they’re not all fully realized and the ones that are cannot help but feel unearned. Hijinks, despite the fact that they might very well endanger the well-being and future of all the good folks in this small town, are encouraged, and actually ultimately win over the girl, because, I guess, they demonstrate or intimate a deeper emotional life behind the rough exterior of Colin’s grim demeanor. “I don’t want to be so old and … sad,” he says to her in his most emotional line of the film, which is saying something. But Colin never develops the kind of emotional generosity that his love interest is seeking. So too does his brother Les somewhat abruptly experience a sea-change of generosity.
The film is oddly conservative in this way: relying on genre tropes to keep it neat. Part of this, I think is the remake effect, an over-reliance on certain universal elements of storytelling, borrowed from the original script when translated to a new language or culture. Some elements of the movie, like the wildfires of 2019-20 are distinctly Australian and freeze it in a time and place, but the commentary on the the fires, their connection to ecology, climate change, the politics of the country, really anything beyond a sexy backdrop for some of the drama that occurs in the final act of the movie is not quite there. The only real moments of commentary are these little glimpses into news coverage and a sticker on one of the pieces of fire fighting equipment that asks people to “Fight Arson” by reporting it for rewards, repeating that insidious false rumor that the fires were caused by arsons, somehow. Anyway, if you’re down for a sort of stodgy family drama about sheep, please check this one out.
