Starring: Billy Howle, Tom Bateman, Phoebe Tonkin, Mark Coles Smith, Hunter Page-Lochard
Distributor: Madman Films
Runtime: 127 mins. Reviewed in Sep 2024
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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Set in a 1970s sweat-drenched world of tent boxing in outback Western Australia, Kid Snow is a film about breaking free from the cycle of loss and regret.
Once upon a time in Australia, there were travelling fairs, which featured boxing stars ready to take on the locals as part of the show. They were popular during World War I and continued for decades. In fact, the story opens in 1961 and the main action taking place in 1971. The fairs were popular, beginning at the time of the introduction of radio, before television, certainly long before social media. In fact, in one sequence here, a boxing bout is watched on television, black-and-white, even in 1971 before the coming of colour TV.
A reviewer’s note: This is the kind of film we used to make in Australia. It is a story of ordinary people, often referred to in the past as ‘battlers’, and not just because of the boxing, but of the struggles in making a living. The characters here all have these stories – Irish migration, fixed fights and betting, returning from Vietnam, single parents, dancing in Kings Cross nightclubs, Indigenous involved in the boxing troupes, sometimes hand-to-mouth subsistence…
In 1961, we are introduced to two boxing brothers, Rory and Kid. Their father manages them, and we see the life of bets, tough fights, set-ups, knockouts, Kid knocked down, giving way to his brother – drinking, driving and then a disastrous car crash.
In 1971, Rory, with a limp from his leg injured in the crash, runs the touring fair. Kid is the featured boxer, with back-up from some of the Indigenous travelling with them. British actors play the brothers. Kid (Howle) looks unkempt, often bewildered, his brother Rory (Bateman) dominating him. Coles Smith and Page-Lochard feature in the entourage. Haunting them is the memory of the defeat by the national champion, Hammer (Gorey) who runs a boxing training centre.
An American journalist from Life Magazine (Taylor) is following Hammer, interviewing Rory and Kid, trying to get a story about the boxing world in Australia as such travelling troupes not part of the American boxing scene.
A further complication is Sunny (Tonkin), battling with her young son, Darcy. Her husband has been wounded in Vietnam. Slyly picking pockets of the boxing audience she is confronted by Rory and becomes a dancer with her own tent. She is able to survive with her son and a strange relationship develops with Kid, who become something of a babysitter for the boy.
In the background the entrepreneurs are trying to organise a bout between Kid and Hammer (who hates Kid), a set-up, betting and profit. Rory, who is indebted to these entrepreneurs, forces Kid to train.
Which means there are several boxing sequences, especially that final fight. However, a lot of the film focuses on personal struggles – between the two brothers, Sunny and her situation and background, and concern for Darcy. There are interventions by the American journalist, and a confrontation between the two brothers where truths are aired.
We know where the story is going but, satisfyingly, it is not exactly what we might have expected and the final, perhaps inevitable, visualising of the meeting leaves the audience satisfied.
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