Cate Blanchett’s New Film Is a Major Flop at Cannes

This reviewer wasn’t expecting to be reminded of the Frank Darabont dud The Green Mile during the Cannes Film Festival, but Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy treads the same sort of line of hokey magic realism territory. A valiant but perhaps rather mannered performance by Cate Blanchett cannot rescue this movie from its turgid instincts.

As the film begins, the central character—a wild and nameless Aboriginal child, played somewhat gratingly by newcomer Aswan Reid—is presented to us against the magnificent backdrop of the Australian outback, where the boy tussles with a white captor before being kidnapped and delivered to a convent, writhing and struggling in a sack.

Here, Sister Eileen (Blanchett) has the guardianship of a gaggle of young boys, whom she looks after with the assistance of two helpers (Deborah Mailman and Wayne Blair). The second world war is raging all around, enabling the eccentric Sister Eileen to establish a much more loose and unconventional establishment than could have been expected. Here, the boy overcomes an initial onslaught of bullying from the other kids, and wins over his supervisors with his charmingly affectless ways—think Haley Joel Osment meets Nell and you’re in the right sort of territory.

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