Once Were Warriors.

While watching Once Were Warriors, perhaps the most acclaimed movie ever to come out of New Zealand, I kept thinking of A Streetcar Named Desire. The domestic situation of the Maori couple, Beth and Jake Heke, is roughly the same as Stella and Stanley Kowalski's. She is the descendant of aristocratic warriors, he is a proletarian who pulled his bride off her "pedestal" and secured her complaisance through sheer sexual dominance. Having adjusted to Jake's milieu so well that she now seems part of it, Beth can knock the cap off a beer bottle with magisterial briskness and can out-cuss any of her husband's mates at the all-night drinking bashes held several times a week in the Heke home. And, with her strong arms, earth-goddess voluptuousness, and ear-to-ear grin, Rena Owen's Beth seems, in the early scenes of the movie, a perfect match for the tank-like Jake of Temuera Morrison.

But this is a match made in hell. The Hekes are the Kowalskis after twenty years of marriage and there have been too many drinks, too many brawls, too much brutality. Stanley Kowalski, it may be recalled, was valued by Stella as a good provider, but Jake blithely accepts his latest sacking because the government dole is only a few dollars less than his salary, and, besides, he now has more time for drinking with his buddies. If Stanley, turning ugly at a stag booze-up, cuffs Stella and then shows abject remorse when he sobers up, Jake punches Beth full force in the face for refusing to fry an egg, kicks her in the stomach, and, when he sobers up, complains that the monstrously swollen eye he's given her makes her look ugly. Stanley's remorse led to mutually fervent, tender lovemaking, but Jake concludes his beatings with rape. The Heke children are terrorized, while the two oldest boys are out on the street turning criminal, the others cringe on their beds wailing as the beating goes on and on in the adjoining bedroom. Once Were Warriors isn't a repeat of Streetcar; it's a disillusioning chastising sequel.

The great strength of this movie is in its texture, in director Lee Tamahori's devotion to getting the details just right. The instability of the Heke home is perfectly mirrored in the Heke house--why clean up when Dad will only wreck everything at the next party? The bracing yet remorseless brightness of New Zealand sunlight, the mixture of macho menace and equally macho conviviality in the working-class bars, the cheerful we've-seen-it-all-before callousness of the white policemen collaring the native delinquents--all this is captured to perfection. Particularly deft is the way the presence of American pop culture in Maori life is shown. The kids listen to rap, while their parents are signing the soft rock of three decades ago with beery nostalgia. On the bodies of Maori gang-bangers are tattoos that both recall aboriginal body-painting and make the kids look like the sci-fi villains of The Road Warrior. And consider the Lethal Weapon and White Men Can't Jump posters on the oldest daughter's bedroom wall. Plenty of transracial male bonding pictured there! White supercop Mel Gibson stands shoulder-to-shoulder with black supercop Danny Glover, and Woody hustles basketball with Wesley. But what does the Heke daughter know of such racial harmony outside the world of pop?

Best of all is the acting of Owen and Morrison, who embody the characters in the most literal sense. They show us how Beth and Jake have lived together for years by showing us how two bodies have been together, slamming into each other, teasing, mocking, loving, and finally instilling revulsion in each other. I don't think I've seen such purely kinetic interaction between male and female actors since...well, since Brando and Kim Hunter in Streetcar.

But, though the expert acting and staging have been rightly praised, even more acclaim has been focused on the way the movie's domestic violence points to another theme: the degradation of the Maori culture to which the title alludes. Once there was a nation of great warriors, but now racism and depredations of urban life have reduced the Maoris, or at least segments of them, to what the Hekes have become. But, for me, this was the weakest aspect of the movie.

For one thing, Jake's allusion to the fact that he was descended from native slaves (rather than the Maori chieftains who were Beth's forebears) informs us that this is the source of the inferiority complex that keeps him beer-sodden and brutal. By battering Beth, he is also battering her superior social standing. I'm willing to accept this as the motivation of an individual, but am I also to take Jake as representative of an entire class? Apparently so, since the only men of his class in this movie are shown as utter brutes while all the women are potential or actual victims who know they're supposed to "keep their mouths shut and their legs open." Conversely, when Beth's parents and siblings (the descendants of noble warriors) show up for a grand-daughter's funeral, they are well-dressed, well-mannered, elegant of speech, self-respecting loving, and humane. Are we to think that only the descendants of the Maori warrior-caste can inevitably thrive as long as they stay in touch with their traditions, while other natives are doomed to squalor and violence because their slave ancestry gives them no tradition to honor and uphold?

The movie seems to assent to this by showing that one of the Heke boys, sent to reform school, undergoes rehabilitation only because an instructor makes him and other boys learn tribal chants and martial disciplines. I well understand the value of instilling racial pride into delinquents, but when the teacher promises to show the boy how to use his mind as a weapon, I had to wonder how the tribal rituals were going to serve as the basis for intellectual accomplishment. It's not that I doubt that it could happen, it's just that the moviemakers' automatic assumption that it would happen left me skeptical.

In fact, there is a romantic swooniness about ethnic pride that brings Warriors close to a sort of intraracial racism. Jake, the descendant of slaves, will always remain a slave (to drink, to his passions), but Beth, descendant of free warriors, has only to return to her parents and her caste to become a proud, self-respecting woman again. That Beth leaves Jake for good is humanly and dramatically justified by the fact that he has indirectly caused the death of one of their children. But, after twenty years of marriage, will it really be so easy for her to make the break, to wash that part of her that has become so much like him out of her system? The moviemakers seem to think so. This programmatic attitude is what makes the concluding scenes of this otherwise brilliant film relatively mechanical. It's as if Tennessee Williams had decided that Blanche Dubois was right when she called Stanley Kowalski a dumb Polack.