Caleb Landry Jones Brought Us Into the Mind of a Killer in This Drama

The big picture

• Caleb Landry Jones excels at portraying intriguing characters ranging from creepy boys to endearing children.
• Nitram
  showcases Jones' outstanding performance as a disturbed man in Australia, capturing his descent into despair and aggression.
• The film offers a nuanced portrait of a real-life mass murderer without glorifying or rationalizing his actions, offering a critical examination.

From the beginning of his career, Caleb Landry Jones has been a reliable source of colorful characters that light up a scene. Since he first appeared as one of the children in the final scene of There is no country for old menhas gone on to become a major actor in films ranging from X-Men: First Class a Three billboards outside Ebbing, Missourii To go out. He's specialized in playing both guys who just turn on you for a reason you can't explain or those who come across as a boyish boy that makes him endearing. Although he hasn't often had the opportunity to star in a major film, he always does reach for the star, he absolutely nails it. see Brandon Cronenberg's Antiviral or Luc Bessonthe latest movie of Dogman, to see Jones step effortlessly into the spotlight. One of his best leading performances was in 2021 with the Australian drama, nitrate, who commissioned him to portray one of the most notorious mass shooters in world history. He gave a performance that was the gold standard for how to portray real-life killers with empathy and an appropriate level of uncomfortable identification.

What is “Nitram”?

Nitram (Jones) is a young man living in Tasmania, Australia, who has a serious case of bad vibes. He's a grumpy, creepy guy who loves playing with firecrackers, trying to start his hobby lawn mowing business, and goading others with his behavior. Her mother (Judy Davis) and the father (Anthony LaPaglia) do their best to love and appreciate their son for who he is, clearly having resigned themselves for a long time to the fact that their son will always be a misfit. They have a pseudo-good-cop-bad-cop dynamic, where their mother is stricter and tries to lay down the law while the father lets things slide and tries to be nicer. Moments of real happiness are like quick flashes of a beacon before the darkness takes over again, as Nitram is ultimately too adrift in his own world to be saved. The only real solace he finds is with a local heiress named Helen (Essie Davis), who takes him in as one of the many dogs he keeps after he comes to offer his lawn-mowing skills. She appreciates his company and finds him supportive and the only person she wants to be around, forming a not unlike kinship. Harold and Maude, minus any hint of sexual or romantic longing. A connection like this gives Nitram aspirations, allowing him to get a taste of the flourishing social life he's always wanted.

Caleb Landry Jones plays a version of real-life mass murderer Martin Bryant

There is something really repellent about Nitram. His parents can only put up with him for so long, and even they can't hide how shocked they are by his antics. Any attempt to talk to people other than her parents or Helen leads to negative results, whether it's entertaining younger kids with firecrackers or trying to talk to someone her own age that she used to go to school with, only to be deterred – him because that boy insulted him. . Helen seems to talk to him mostly because he makes her feel good about herself; and frankly, no one else seems willing to talk to her. She is introduced as the local madwoman, given her badly dyed hair job and run-down mansion that she doesn't take care of. But Nitram finds a way to ruin even that good relationship he has, showing how powerless he is in the face of his worst impulses. Throughout the film, he has this grieving grimace on his face whenever something goes wrong, silently beating himself up and trying to rebuild the walls that are clearly falling down. Even worse is the painful awareness he has of his shortcomings, sharing with his mother that he knows people openly say he has mental problems and that he is a burden on his family.

Jones shows us things about Nitram that he couldn't verbalize to delve into the character's mental limitations and how they manifest physically. The character of Nitram is based on the real-life Martin Bryant (yes, retarded Nitram is Martin) who, in 1996, committed the deadliest mass murder in modern Australian history known as the Port Arthur Massacre .. Bryant was confirmed to have the mental capacity of an 11-year-old, with an IQ of 66, and Jones displays his childish clumsiness so effectively that it limits the need for exposition. He moves with his shoulders first and his head down, shrinking in height, despite his height. He clearly has no idea how to process extremely negative emotions, resorting to physical violence or incoherent shouting when he's visibly upset and holding people captive when the volcano erupts.

Sometimes his violent outbursts are even less justified, like when he sits in the passenger side of a car and grabs the steering wheel to swerve it into oncoming traffic, all for joy. Jones plays Nitram as an underdeveloped child who doesn't understand his own strength and is desperate to feel accepted in a way that he finds more accommodating (only to him). Her mother is too strict and pushy, her father is too ineffectual and mopey, and Helen feeds off all her antics with the enthusiasm of the cool aunt who lets you get away with it when your parents aren't looking . He clings to her as the mother figure he's always wanted, and part of the tragedy is seeing how the pattern of behavior that got Helen interested in Nitram is also what drives her away from him.

Nitram's relationship with his mother is key to the film's success

Speaking of mother figures, the key to discovering how the film works so devastatingly is in the relationship between Nitram and his mother, and the interaction Jones has with Judy Davis. Unconditional motherly love is a concept that is usually taken at first as a beautiful notion, but Davis' uncompromising performance suggests that it can also be an immense curse. She may have accepted who Nitram is and may be able to discipline him and keep him somewhat in line, but she has long since given up any semblance of hope or goodwill for him. It's not that she doesn't love him, it's that she's smart enough not to have any hope for him. Davis shines as a woman with a backbone of steel and a clear vision, best exemplified in a scene where she describes how Nitram has always been the way it is. He explains how he purposely hid from her for so long that she thought he was kidnapped, only to reveal himself and laugh at her misery, leading her to believe that he will always cause you pain and then when laughing

This culminates in a brutal conversation between them, where Nitram breaks down, frustrated with the direction his life has taken and not knowing how to change things. He points out how he doesn't understand why his father can be so constantly down in the dumps, noting his belief that everyone goes bad all the time and it works out fine.. It's the closest we get to a spoken view of how Nitram's mind works, his assumption that the human condition is inherently based on suffering. She's as supportive as can be, basically following the script of a loving mother, but Davis hints at a sense of going for the bare minimum, while Jones implodes from the humiliation of admitting her limitations. It's a sad snapshot of their entire relationship in one moment, it also functions as a harbinger of the eventual growing instability that Nitram will experience.

'Nitram' depicts a killer without trying to sympathize with him

Trying to make a movie that explores (and sometimes explains) an atrocity like mass murder is a dubious idea, to be sure. Some films try to go for a coldly factual approach, presenting it as an inevitable force of nature (We need to talk about Kevin). Others go in the direction of trying to get into the head of the aggressor, to the point of rationalizing their point of view so much that it inadvertently becomes an apology (joker). Nitram he walks a precarious line of imagining the world as Nitram/Martin felt it, but never really going inside his mind, or even trying to diagnose or point the finger at what might have caused him to do so.

Even when he acquires guns and teaches himself how to fire them, it feels like an awkward twist that the film never hinted at, leaving us looking at Jones' face as a last-ditch effort for answers. It is through Jones' performance that we experience the underlying emotional destruction that pushed this man in an unthinkable direction: hopelessness, confusion and distorted anger. While other films are callous enough to try to be the last word on why these things happen in the world, Caleb Landry Jones' performance ensures that Nitram it's a film that knows it can never really explain anything like that. Instead, it portrays a tragic series of dominoes that begin to fall due to both the casual cruelties of the world he lived in and Nitram's own catastrophic behavioral impulses that led him to throw what was basically the worst possible tantrum part of a terribly isolated child.d.

Nitram can be seen on AMC+

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