On one level the story of a migrant family struggling to cohere in the rural Australia of the 1950s, and on another the story of the profoundly complex relationship between a father and son, Romulus, My Father is a narrative that haunts many readers. Gaita’s simple, deft prose is as evocative of the aftermath of World War II and of the power of the Australian landscape as it is of sadness, bereavement and desire. The complex story it tells – stretching from the family’s arrival in Australia in 1950 to Romulus’s death in 1996 – is surprising, confronting and deeply affecting.

Dramatising such intensely personal material for the cinema is fraught with risk. In this case, with the writer of the memoir alive, an adaptor would surely feel a great weight of responsibility when confronting the notion of turning the story into a screenplay. Directing the script would then create its own fidelity minefield of period requirements, casting conundrums and questions of dramatic licence. Adaptation of this kind is never a simple enterprise. It is a delight, therefore, to behold this beautiful filmic translation, adapted for the screen by noted British poet Nick Drake and directed by the man who is arguably Australia’s most accomplished living actor.

Richard Roxburgh, rightly lauded for his performances on stage and screen (many remember his astonishing Hamlet, played on stages around the country, and his turn as Roger Rogerson in the infamous teleseries Blue Murder), is one of Australia’s most versatile performers. He makes his big-screen directorial début here, and it’s a début comparable, in my opinion, to those of Phillip Noyce and Peter Weir. In both its narrative deftness and its highly intelligent visual approach, Roxburgh’s film is immensely assured. The director has surrounded himself with accomplished technicians and performers, and has made of Romulus, My Father a beautiful piece of cinema.

A still from Romulus My Father

Roxburgh and Drake have dealt subtly and honestly with Gaita’s complex text. Gaita himself, in writing his memoir shortly after his father’s death, had to navigate what can only have been complex emotional terrain. The film-makers, juggling the demands of a ninety-minute dramatic format alongside this very real lived experience, had to function as craftsmen and as diplomats. With Gaita himself offering advice on minutiae while Drake worked on subsequent drafts of the screenplay, the process of transformation was carefully managed, and an eye was kept on the tone and spirit of the original text.

Drake himself, in an interview I conducted in May, described the demands particular to this kind of adaptation in a notably sensitive way:

The important thing was to capture the spirit of it, what was emotionally truthful – not the letter of the plot, as it were, but the emotional spirit of the thing … When I’d written a first draft, I came out to stay with Rai in the countryside, and he took me around the places that I’d actually written about second-hand. He took me on a tour of all of these places, and we ended up at the Maryborough graveyard, on a very hot afternoon, standing at the graves of the three characters who I was trying to write into a screenplay. And I tell you, it’s not the same as adapting a novel when you have stood at the graves of the characters you’re writing; you have a sense of responsibility towards the truth of their souls, if you like, and their lives, and I really like that. I think it brings on all of us a responsibility to be truthful.

Such words and sentiments must be heartening for Gaita. With both screenwriter and director determined to make the film text work in as faithful a way as possible, the project maintained this sense of truth from beginning to end.

Perhaps the most obvious key to making all of this come together on screen was the casting of the actors who would play Romulus and Raimond. In this too, the film-makers have been both acutely observant and fortunate. Having secured Eric Bana (whom Roxburgh describes as having an ‘overabundance of charisma’) to play Romulus, they had their work cut out for them to find a child actor who could share the screen with Bana without being knocked off it, and in this regard the casting process has supplied us with a revelation. Kodi Smit-McPhee, a young actor whose pedigree is already impressive, makes an unforgettable Raimond. It is perhaps an ironic facet of ageing that we adults look with wonder upon children who demonstrate an articulate worldliness; not being old enough to have had the experiences we credit ourselves with having learned from, some children nonetheless seem able to understand the overwhelming complexities of what it is to be human. In Smit-McPhee’s performance, we see just this kind of innate intelligence. The young fellow is effortlessly charismatic and photogenic.

Casting the background, too, was an important element of this project; this is a film and a story that plays out amid the vast, powerful Australian landscape, but which is never dwarfed by that fact. Romulus, My Father contains the landscape, as it were, rather than the other way around. The characters before the landscape are what is important; this is an Australian film, not a postcard of Australia, and this fact deserves its own celebration.

Romulus, My Father, as a cinematic story, manages to be every bit as affecting and as subtly uplifting as the extraordinary work upon which it is based. As a paean to Gaita’s text, it is note-perfect; as a cinematic ode written by a gifted screenwriter and delivered by an enviably intelligent film-maker, it is music to the ears and eyes.