Samson and Delilah (January 6th and 7th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[SAMSON AND DELILAH screens Thursday January 6^th at 8:30 pm and Friday January 7^th 7:30 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

For teenage Aborigine Samson (Rowan McNamara), each day is pretty much like the last. He wakes up, huffs some gasoline, and wanders aimlessly about his small village in the Australian outback, the sounds of his older brother's band playing the same reggae song over and over again following Samson like an ironically cheerful soundtrack of desperation. Besides inhalants, about the only thing Samson seems to care about is Delilah (Marissa Gibson), whose life is no less repetitious. Each day she has to force her ailing grandmother to take her medicine. She then runs errands before settling down to work with her grandmother on artwork that can be sold to tourists. She's not particularly interested in Samson, whose idea of a come-on is to throw rocks at the object of his affections, but with the encouragement of her grandmother she starts to soften towards her would-be suitor.

When her grandmother dies in her sleep, the rest of Delilah's family transfers their own guilt to the girl and beat her as punishment. Meanwhile, Samson finally gets sick of his the band playing the same damn song over and over again and hits his brother upside the head with a big stick, knocking him out. It's a shocking moment, but also a cathartic one, as by this time I was pretty sick of the song myself. When Samson's brother recovers, he lays a severe ass kicking on his sibling. With both young people in rough shape, and with seemingly no future and no one who cares about them, the couple steals a truck and heads off for the big city. They hope to find something better there, but it doesn't take long to realize that a change of scenery alone isn't going to bring about happiness.

In SAMSON AND DELILAH, we're asked to care about two characters who give us very little reason to do so. Samson takes a few decisive actions early in the film, after that he just wanders around in a fume-induced haze, and we never really get to know him. Delilah shows an undeniable inner strength, but has no real personality to go along with it. We can accept that these characters might have some kind of attraction to each other. However, for us to believe that there is a greater depth to that attraction, when we have only the film's assertion that there is, indeed, something there, is asking too much. A movie can try to convince us of something all it wants, but unless we actually see and feel it on the screen, we aren't going to believe it.

Writer/director Warwick Thornton spends a great deal of time getting us to view Samson and Delilah's village as a soul-killing, dead-end trap. The way he uses repetition to convey this is the film's best bit of visual storytelling, and it sticks. As for the city, Thornton depicts it as cold and uncaring at best, and frequently outright malicious. Samson and Delilah really have no place where they belong. But instead of realizing that fact and going with a more downbeat conclusion, Thornton instead tries to convince us that his couple just needs to return home. It's a message that rings hollow. 2 ½ out of 4 stars.