Once Were Warriors

Once Were Warriors, (1994) directed by Lee Tamahori, is based on a book of the same name by Alan Huff. It is an interpretation of the modern Maori family, portrayed in all the violence, drama, and sadness that can be dredged from the reality of the situation. The Hekes family deals with the common issues of the lower class Maori, namely alcohol, domestic violence, and history. The patriarch, Jake, is the prominent source of violence in the movie. Jake is laid off early on and thereafter spends most of his time in a pub with his friends drinking and/or fighting, or in his house drinking and/or fighting, mentally, and physically, his wife and kids. The wife, Beth, is a more interesting, yet still frustratingly flat and un-dimensional, character who receives most of the screen time. Of their children we see Nig, who leaves his family to join a gang that partakes in the Maori traditions of tattoos; Grace, the misplaced intellectual who endures the bulk of the pain her family inflicts in the most brutal part of the film; and Boogie, the son who finds himself in social welfare due to his parents’ inability to keep him off the streets.
As a movie, it is as brutal as the situations it depicts and is summed up in the first shot. The camera shows a beautiful New Zealand landscape that, as the camera pans out towards a busy highway and dirty neighborhood, we find out is only a billboard. The movie does just that – it immediately turns away from anything remotely picturesque and focuses instead on life that subsists on the other side of the road. It is a hard movie to watch, but well worth seeing for what is says about the issues that the Maori culture faces in today’s world. Its main themes of misplaced history, domestic violence, and gender relations can pass beyond the Maori culture and into any other culture that has a class of people living by the highway. In this sense it transcends national lines, but has no need to transcend social ones.