Charles Bean's Great War

It's a wonderful story told with grace, quiet humour, and a great deal of cinematic skill. The tall, skinny, rather quaint journalist, with his russet hair and clerical manner, was known to the troops as "Captain Carrot, the war correspondent". He was an unlikely figure amid the carnage of that war, "a battle born of ambition in high places that ends in low slaughter"; bravely stalking the trenches in pursuit of what eventually became a mountain of facts. Never without his faithful Corona typewriter, his brass telescope and blank diaries, Bean recorded the war like no other. He revolutionised official war histories, writing democratically, emphasising not generals but soldiers in the front line, leaving us an honest and highly detailed account. This film is slightly more linear than Fimeri's remarkable earlier Revealing Gallipoli, though he again juxtaposes interviews with a round table of distinguished war historians, voice-over narration (here nicely presented by actress Nadine Garner), and archival footage. It's more of a filmic biography, with Bean beautifully played by Nick Farnell and his wife Ellie by Margot Knight. And on a small budget, with typically inventive and arresting camera-work by director of photography James Grant, Fimeri delivers an elegiac and thoroughly arresting portrait of one of our great writers. As he always does, Fimeri works in a kind of speculative reverie; always alert for what literary critic Peter Steele, writing about biography, once called "riddle, quizzicality and quirk". And like a biographer, Fimeri sees his job as winkling out the truth: one of interpretation, selection and conjuring a terrific story.

Graeme Blundell, The Australian

'His life is retold with admirable artistry and succinctness through terrific understated narration, (provided by Nadine Garner); and excellent re-enactments. The result is a wonderfully compact, complex and textured examination of one of the most quietly influential men in Australian history.' —

Critic's Choice, Pick of the Week, Sunday Age