The Talkies

...and Shane (Joel Edgerton), "the f*** - up...

...When she tells him that she is a meteorologist, he replies "So am I!"—thinkingher profession, like his, must have something to do with meat...

...He studied at New York's Union Theological Seminary under Reinhold Niebuhr—whom he didn't much like, according to Martin Doblmeier's biographical documentary, Bonhoeffer—and could have spent the war in safety here...

...The three complain about this, but it hardly occurs to them not to execute Frank's plans or not to trust him with the loot...

...Bonhoeffer was both a pacifist—who always intended to go to India to study nonviolence with Gandhi—and at the same time, if not an assassin himself, certainly a sympathizer with assassins...

...To be sure, it's not exactly easy to present theology in a cinematically engaging way, but Bonhoeffer's ought to lend itself to such treatment better than anyone's...

...Still, Bonhoeffer comes across here as an appealing character, not least because of what he shared with most great religious revolutionaries: the idea that, as one of his surviving students puts it, "we had to read the Bible as if it was directed to us, here and now" and "throw ourselves completely into the arms of God...

...He has them released so that they can carry out his next robbery, then arrested again, then lets them out for another robbery...

...But I am particularly sorry that it has done so in Australia, whose movie-making elite has hitherto managed to be, on the whole, less self-indulgent in this respect than our own...

...The pity is that the criminals' only endeavor not crowned with success in this movie is Mal's Papageno-like yearning for a little Papagena to love...

...I quite liked the endearingly dim character of Mal, a butcher by trade...

...But then I suppose it could be said to add a touch of much-needed verisimilitude to hint that there is some price to be paid for a life of larceny...

...Niebuhr had written a classic defense of the just war in Moral Man and Immoral Society, but his analysis was influenced, like so much else during the period, by Marxian economics...

...To that end, Frank acquires Tarzan, a psychopathic accomplice from Britain played by Dorian Nikona (and occasioning the memorable line, "Tarzan went ape-s...

...But Bonhoeffer himself seems to have had no active role and was arrested mainly for being a friend of the conspirators...

...Or the social conscience...

...The reason he didn't much like Niebuhr, for instance, is that he thought him too much the philosopher and moralist for someone like himself, a devotee of the Christocentric theology of Karl Barth...

...But he thought that his place was in his native Germany and caught the last boat back home before the commencement of hostilities...

...He falls in love with Pamela (Kate Atkinson), whom the brothers take semi-hostage for her car after their big score at the Melbourne Cup...

...Suspecting his wife's relationship with their lawyer, Dale reads a self-help book, Relationship Rescue, which he hides behind the false front of a television set in his cell...

...Tarzan joins the brothers, while his accomplices from a previous job are gunning for him...

...Bonhoeffer, by contrast, believed in the literal meaning of the Sermon on the Mount as a guide to living—an idea as radical now as it was then and has always been...

...While they're all in prison, Dale's wife Carol (Rachel Griffiths) is sleeping with his lawyer Frank Malone (Robert Taylor...

...The Hard Word, written and directed by Scott Roberts, has nothing more to offer us than our natural tendency to admire Australian cool, in this case manifested in the stick-up skills of the three Twentyman brothers: Dale (Guy Pearce), "the smart one...

...Though she immediately thinks better of it and gives nothing away, her moment of fear and intended betrayal is, enough to damn her in all three brothers' eyes...

...But for those with an interest in the moral and religious response to Nazism in Germany, this will be a welcome documentary about an indispensable character in the story...

...At least the dramatic moment of ultimate choice is left until the end...

...Well, yes, but I'm guessing he would have sailed to New York whether Hitler had been on the rise at the time or not...

...Such hints that his subject was a kind of international man of mystery are presumably Doblmeier's way of making him more interesting to audiences whose knowledge of the Second World War comes mainly from movies and whose prejudices lately seem to run counter to religious heroes...

...I suppose it was only a matter of time before the American-style cinematic prison-fantasy—in which the audience's sympathy for thieves and gangsters, long a staple of the movies, is finally and unashamedly extended to sympathy for their thievery and gangsterism—started popping up in as-yet uncorrupted movie cultures...

...The result in the film is an annoying reaching-after effect, as when we are told that "in September 1930, as Hitler continued his rise, Dietrich Bonhoeffer sailed aboard the Columbus for New York...

...These are supposed to be—I guess—sort of latter-day Ned Kellys, only without the unhappy ending...

...Thus the tortured process by whichthis man of God and of nonviolence came to approve of murder—and the implications of that conclusion for his moral thought—ought to have been worth more attention than Doblmeier gives it...

...There is more going on...

...When Frank hatches a plan for the biggest payday of all—a robbery of the bookies' meeting after the Melbourne Cup horse race—he decides this time to kill all three of the brothers instead of just sending them back to jail...

...Mal (Damien Richardson), "the good one...

...Likewise, the film seems inclined to credit the view that the Lutheran Church was guilty of "preparing the foundation for Hitler" simply by its patriotism, a view that may have made sense at the time but in retrospect does not take account of the uniqueness of Hitlerism...

...In prison, brother Shane—"My friends call me `Muscles"'—is assigned a counselor, Jane Moore (Rhondda Findleton), who elicits his secret sorrow, that he slept with his mother—whereupon he starts sleeping with Jane...

...But what it's all going to come down to—as you can pretty much tell from the start—is which way Carol will jump, or shoot, when she has to choose between her husband and her lover...

...Through some sort of corrupt influence with the warden, Frank appears to have unlimited powers to have the brothers incarcerated or released, though quite how is never explained...

...To Bonhoeffer, the Christian revelation meant that "whenever Christ calls us, His call leads us to death"—an idea so far out of keeping with most religious thought today that you'd think Doblmeier would have made more of it, if only for its shock value...

...Doblmeier's film, released this summer, makes much of Bonhoeffer's involvement in the plot against Hitler, which culminated in the assassination attempt by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and others in July 1944...

...Doblmeier mentions this, but does not go into the implications for Bonhoeffer's attitude toward the war, and war in general—which were both radical and contradictory...

...She likes him anyway, however, and he's heartbroken when he overhears her dialing the police after she finds out who they are...

...Like Bonhoeffer's love of America—and especially ofblack gospel music as he first experienced it at Adam Clayton Powell Senior's Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem—they may make him more appealing to today's America, but they are much less important than his theology, on which the film spends surprisingly little time...

...There's not even very much of a story...

...Or, indeed, any redeeming feature at all, save their ineffable cool and charm...