Film review from Telluride2019: 'The Australian Dream'
Few contemporary national sports heroes have endured the abusive treatment heaped on Adam Goodes, the Aboriginal Aussie Rules star who landed at the center of an angry social media storm, fueled by conservative media, when he ordered security to remove a 13-year-old girl from the stands after she loudly called him an ape during the Australian Football League's 2013 annual Indigenous Round game.
If the inclusion of both Goodes and Grant as quasi-narrators creates some uncertainty of focus in the early sections, the strategy makes sense in the closing stretch, after we see snippets of Grant's stirring 2015 speech about how the treatment of Goodes resonated for all Indigenous Australians. "I can tell you what we heard when we heard those boos," he said. "We heard a sound that was very familiar to us. We heard a howl.
But the film's emotional immediacy comes primarily from its personal focus on Goodes, who emerges as a modest, thoughtful man walking a careful line between calling out injustices visited upon Australia's original peoples and extending an open hand toward reconciliation.
There are powerful testimonials from Indigenous AFL players that preceded Goodes, notably Nicky Winmar, who responded to racial vilification during the 1993 season with the instantly famous gesture of lifting his guernsey and pointing to his skin with pride. Goodes recreated that image years later, but it was his celebration of a goal, during the booing saga, with an Indigenous war dance that included miming a spear toss that sparked renewed outrage from conservatives.
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