Brave men instil hope

I am inclined to approach stories about men, poor behaviour, bullying and the inevitable redemption where people come good with a sense of disquiet.

Perhaps it's something about the neat packaging of such stories and the way they fit into whatever is the latest way of neatly understanding our world.

So I approached Making Good Men, on Prime next Monday at 9.30pm, with some trepidation.

But it didn't take too long for such concerns to melt in the face of what seemed to be real bravery on the part of those telling their stories.

Making Good Men tells the story of a moment of obscene teenage violence by the man who would later become an All Black, Norm Hewitt, on now-actor Manu Bennett.

We meet the pair after they met older and wiser, forgave and learned something about themselves and their lives.

For Hewitt, what was otherwise a happy farming childhood in Hastings was marred by a violent father.

He tells of watching his mother beaten by his father, and of the cruel beatings he received from a man unable to stop his own violence once he started.

Hewitt goes on to tell of his sexual abuse by an older boy at Te Aute College in Hawke's Bay, in what sounded similar to the excesses of British boarding schools in the past.

Bennett tells of his brother falling into a coma after a car crash, then himself being badly injured and his mother dying in another when his family's car was hit by a drunk driver.

The brother died shortly after, before Bennett ended up at Te Aute.

Bennett was drafted into the First XV despite not having played rugby before, much to the chagrin of Hewitt, who aped the behaviour of his father one fateful day at the school.

Both went on to excel at their careers, though for Hewitt it took one well-documented drunken 1999 incident in Queenstown when he smashed through a glass door into the wrong hotel room to finally start making changes.

Bennett went on to star in everything from Spartacus to The Hobbit.

Making Good Men shows how people who have struggled through some awful life experiences can come through the other side.

I guess it gives us all some hope that the damage done in youth need not follow us through adult life.

Meanwhile, on Thursday next week at 8.30pm on TV2, Australian series Seven Year Switch comes to our screens.

Seven Year Switch follows four couples on the brink of separation as they leave their partners and enter into an experimental marriage with a complete stranger.

Why?

I honestly have no idea.

 - by Charles Loughery 

 

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