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I’ve never seen Dancing with Wolves but I’ve seen plenty of other ‘a white person becomes a part of the local tribe’ movies, including the most famous example — Avatar. These are not necessarily bad movies because of this conceit — The Last Samurai is still quite compelling despite it — but it’s a dangerous tightrope to walk to avoid falling prey to the same old cliches. But when care and respect are paid to the local cultures, and especially when written or directed by someone from there, the odds are a lot better that it will turn out okay.
The Convert comes from director Lee Tamahori, who co-wrote it with Shane Danielsen, based on the 2011 novel Wulf by Hamish Clayton. The film stars Guy Pearce as Thomas Munro, a lay preacher from Britain around 1830 when the British Empire was still expanding. He arrives near the newly formed outpost only to see a conflict between two groups of Maori tribes — one that seems to be slaughtered by the other.
The winning tribe is of Akatarewa (Lawrence Makoare), a bloodthirsty type, and he only allows Munroe, begging to save a young couple, to pick just one of them — so forced to choose, he picks the woman Rangimai (Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne), who is still quite injured. Encountering racism and prejudice from his fellow Brits, Munro is desperate to find someone to help the young victim. One of the only sympathetic young British women lets Munro know about a possible helper — a healer and a white woman, Charlotte (Jacqueline McKenzie) — who speaks the local language and knows how to help Rangimai recuperate.
Rangimai’s father, the chieftain of his own tribe Maianui (Antonio Te Maioha) with little seeming care, accepts the situation but requests that Munro become his daughter’s tutor in the ways of this foreign religion. And since the Brits are paying Maianui to settle there, they can’t really say no — and he also insists on leaving one of his warriors to keep an eye on his daughter.
Of course things aren’t so simple — tensions rise due to the mere presence of the Maori warrior, and things only get worse in scenes that zip suddenly. The movie is about 2 hours long and sags a bit in the second act, especially when a few romantic subplots are inserted in ways that seem fairly surface level. But the real tension is the inevitable clash between the tribes as Munro keeps trying his best to keep things peaceful — but he knows it is unlikely to work.
Eventually we learn more about the backstory of the two white people and why they seem to be different from the rest — this never goes quite into Last Samurai territory, where the locals learn more from the white outsiders than vice versa, but it is a bit of a well-trodden territory to get into again.
What helps elevate this tale is the levelheaded acting from Guy Pearce and excellent emotionality from Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne — the rest of the tribes people vary in how much they are given to do — it involves a lot of warlike shouting, but it does sound better in Māori for sure. And when we do get to action scenes, they are winningly brutal and well paced — the action in general tends to work better than some of the melodrama scenes.
The movie takes care to be as accurate as possible when it comes to Maori customs, even if some of the historical details are fudged a bit to create a more compelling drama. It’s overall a fairly simplistic story, but it’s not like historical Maori/New Zealand movies are that common, and several were already made by Lee Tamahori! So I give a lot of credit for the brutal and uncompromising bits — perhaps things would’ve been survived a bit better with a bit less of a focus on the romantic drama elements and the outsider’s pain, but it’s overall a pretty entertaining story, if just a bit too overstuffed.
The Convert has a run time of 1 hour 59 minute, and is not rated.
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