Filmmaker Justin Kurzel’s filmography is lined with serial killers, white supremacists, and gang leaders. So it’s only natural to look at Jacob Elordi’s clean-as-a-whistle Dorrigo Evans in the miniseries “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” and wait for a big reveal. There couldn’t possibly be a male worth emulating in a Kurzel project?
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At least from the first two episodes that screened at the Berlin Film Festival, the worst that can be said about Dorrigo is that he’s an adulterer. But he’s not even a homewrecker as he lets go of the true love of his life, the firecracker Amy Mulvaney (a sizzling Odessa Young), so she can remain married to his uncle Keith (Simon Baker). It’s evident from his vanilla sex scene with Ella (played at youth by Olivia DeJonge and as an adult by Heather Mitchell), his eventual wife, that he takes honor so seriously that he’s willing to accept a life of wistful longing to uphold his commitments.
Elordi excels as a solid, sturdy leader for a military group with the golden retriever vibes of a varsity team captain. (It’s not just his towering height, but that doesn’t hurt.) As a medic rather than a machine gunner, Dorrigo’s aim is less to take lives and more to save them. When the Japanese army captures his unit and forces them into a “Bridge on the River Kwai”-esque forced railway labor situation, he’s the steady hand that tries to keep as many of the men alive as possible.
There’s brutal imagery as the soldiers’ prolonged captivity drives them to the point of emaciation, but Kurzel tones down his typically punishing approach to the carnage in this wartime setting. He even depicts a bloody beheading from a gentle distance instead of with gruesome immediacy. “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” plays like an earnest B-side to his typically cynical depictions of the male tendency toward violence.
What a difference having a shared sense of purpose within a group of men makes. The show celebrates the casual camaraderie of the soldiers, be it over irreverent banter or casually teasing a compatriot over his accidental erection. These mutually sustaining ties prevent the breakdown of order into chaos, though their starvation at the hands of their captors nearly drives one Aussie to kamikaze lengths. Kurzel’s surveys of their gaggle, often from above in some form of coordinated motion, are exhilarating demonstrations of fraternal belonging that pop against the show’s desaturated color palette.
The show could stand to humanize them a bit further, though. Only Dorrigo’s chum Frank Gardiner (Thomas Weatherall) stands out from the undifferentiated masses. What good is all the extended time afforded by the medium of television if it can’t grant intimacy with a vast ensemble?
Kurzel and writer Shaun Grant, working from a novel by Richard Flanagan, rely on love as a strong throughline to connect all three timelines in the show. The companionate affection Dorrigo feels for his fellow boys in uniform is meant to exist on a similar plane as his torrid pre-war affair with Amy, and the series cannot quite sell that parallel. An elder Dorrigo (Ciarán Hinds) continuing with his practice of womanizing close to home – this time, hooking up with his colleague’s wife Lynette (Essie Davis) – feels out of sync entirely. It plays like the tacked-on postscript of a Weinstein-era awards bait movie just got crosscut into the action itself.
The focus-pulling vantage point from the late 1980s feels out of place. It also highlights the uncomfortable truth behind many a prestige miniseries: this could have just been a feature film with some tightened editing. “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” feels a bit discombobulated trying to balance three different stories with only a loose thematic connection tying them together.
Elordi has the leading man chops to paper over some deficiencies, yet Kurzel’s show cannot quite muster the hero’s welcome for such a turn. Maybe that’s for the better, given Dorrigo’s brooding fate. Still, a little hint of “Band of Brothers” never hurt anybody. [B]
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