The Dressmaker (2015)

28 Monday Nov 2016

Tags

1951, Australia, Comedy, Drama, Dressmaking, Dungatar, Hugo Weaving, Jocelyn Moorhouse, Judy Davis, Kate Winslet, Literary adaptation, Mystery, Revenge, Review, Sarah Snook

D: Jocelyn Moorhouse / 119m

Cast: Kate Winslet, Judy Davis, Liam Hemsworth, Hugo Weaving, Sarah Snook, Kerry Fox, Shane Bourne, Alison Whyte, Caroline Goodall, James Mackay, Sacha Horler, Gyton Grantley, Julia Blake, Barry Otto, Rory Potter

It’s Australia, and it’s 1951. The tiny rural town of Dungatar sees the return of Myrtle “Tilly” Dunnage (Winslet) after having been sent away as a child twenty-five years before for the suspected murder of Stewart Pettyman (Potter), the son of town councillor Evan Pettyman (Bourne). She’s back for two reasons: to look after her mother, Molly (Davis), who is suffering from dementia, and to discover the truth about what happened twenty-five years ago (Tilly doesn’t remember). The townsfolk aren’t exactly pleased to see her, with only Sergeant Farrat (Weaving) treating her fairly. Unconcerned, Tilly goes about caring for her mother, while also stirring things up around town, appearing in sexy, haute couture gowns and turning the heads of all the eligible and not-so-eligible men, and in particular, Teddy McSwiney (Hemsworth).

With the townsfolk treating her with suspicion and disrespect, she lets them know that she can make any of them bespoke dresses or outfits. Her first customer is young bride-to-be Gertrude Pratt (Snook). Going against her mother’s wishes, Gertrude is over the moon with the dress Tilly makes for her, and it’s not long before most of the women in town have followed suit. Pettyman employs the services of another dressmaker, Una Pleasance (Horler), but her efforts aren’t anywhere near as successful. Meanwhile, Tilly begins a tentative relationship with Teddy, while her mother’s memory improves, and her investigation into what happened to Stewart Pettyman starts to gather momentum.

Along the way, town secrets are exposed, simmering animosities boil over, and Tilly’s skills as a dressmaker serve as a way of exacting revenge for the way she was treated as a child. Answers are revealed, lives are changed irrevocably, a tragedy ensues, and Dungatar’s entry into a local Eisteddfod affords Tilly the opportunity to carry out her ultimate revenge.

An adaptation of the novel by Rosalie Ham, The Dressmaker is a mixed bag indeed. Combining drama, comedy and romance, and mashing them all together (sometimes in the same scene), it’s a movie that is likely to divide audiences into two camps: those who prefer to have their revenge dramas played entirely straight throughout, and those who prefer to have their comedies unspoiled by dramatic stretches that restrict the belly laughs found elsewhere. Your tolerance for this mash-up will depend very much on going with the movie’s very particular flow, as Moorhouse and her co-screenwriter, husband P.J. Hogan, have embraced both the jaundiced drama and the wicked comedy inherent in Ham’s novel.

The result is a movie that’s tonally uneven and switches focus from comedy to drama and back again with unrestrained abandon. Moorhouse concentrates on the humour during the first hour, and gifts Davis with some great lines, some of them throwaways that make you wish the actress had made more comedies before this. When Tilly tells Gertrude the cost of the dress she wants made, Gertrude remarks that the cost is “outrageous”. Quick as a flash, Molly says, “So’s your bum.” Davis’ timing is simply brilliant. There are other moments that are equally as funny, and the cast can be seen to be enjoying themselves tremendously during these scenes. But all good things must come to an end, and the movie’s second half slowly sheds the comedy in order to concentrate more fully, and with more necessity, on the drama.

But as well as shedding the humour, the script also sheds the shading and carefully orchestrated character beats, and leaves the viewer overwhelmed by increasing levels of melodrama. As well as the tragedy already alluded to, there is madness, murder, and extended bouts of retribution. There’s so much in fact, that Moorhouse struggles to find a way of making it all feel organic, with most scenes feeling forced by the need for resolution of the various subplots involving the townsfolk. By the time Tilly leaves Dungatar behind, the viewer may well be heaving a sigh of relief before laughing in gratitude at her final line of dialogue.

Thankfully, the movie’s flaws are more than compensated for by the performances. Davis steals the movie as the raddled, alcoholic, dementia-suffering Molly. It’s possibly the least glamorous role you’re likely to see for some time, but Davis is superb in it, caustic and sharp despite the dementia, and effortlessly dominating the scenes she’s in. Alongside her, Winslet gives another impressive performance, expressing Tilly’s determination and anger at how she was treated as a child, and yet also displaying an uncertainty and a mistrust surrounding her memories of her childhood. There are moments where Winslet is called upon to point up the character’s emotional fragility, and she does so in such an honest way that it’s entirely credible.

In support, Weaving is a delight as the crossdressing Sergeant Farrat, fey on the one hand, sturdy on the other, and a hoot as Rudolph Valentino. Hemsworth does enough to avoid giving an entirely wooden performance, but against Winslet still looks like a complete amateur. Further down the list there are good roles for, and good performances from, the likes of Kerry Fox as the acid-tongued schoolteacher, Bourne as the philandering town councillor, Blake as the ailing wife of the town’s doctor (Otto), Snook as the initially vapid but later viperish Gertrude, and Grantley as Teddy’s brother, Barney, who holds the key to what happened to Stewart Pettyman.

As befits a movie concerned with dressmaking, the costumes, designed by Marion Boyce and Margot Wilson, are fantastic, beautiful creations that flatter and enhance the female cast they were made for in exactly the way they were meant to flatter and enhance the characters. Winslet gets to show off her curves in a variety of figure hugging outfits, and there’s one scene where the dress she wears is – in terms of the time in which the movie is set – a precursor to the one worn by Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita (1960). And the overall look of the movie is like that of a Western, with Tilly “riding” back into town as an avenging angel á la Clint Eastwood in Hang ‘Em High (1968) or Pale Rider (1985). There are other references to other movies, some quite easy to spot, and some more subtly placed, but these don’t detract from the movie at all, but do add to the fun that can be had (in the first hour).

Rating: 7/10 – on balance, The Dressmaker‘s imbalance in terms of its storyline and tone should make this at least an awkward or unfulfilling watch, but somehow it’s a movie where it works more often than it doesn’t; with a standout turn from Davis, ravishing costumes, and a spare visual sense that suits the material, this is one of those movies where it’s unlikely for two different viewers to come to a consensus – but strangely, that’s one of its strengths.

Oddball (2015)

18 Friday Mar 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Alan Tudyk, Chicken farmer, Coco Jack Gillies, Comedy, Drama, Foxes, Maremma, Middle Island, Penguins, Review, Sanctuary, Sarah Snook, Shane Jacobson, Stuart McDonald, True story, Warrnambool

aka Oddball and the Penguins

D: Stuart McDonald / 95m

Cast: Shane Jacobson, Sarah Snook, Alan Tudyk, Coco Jack Gillies, Richard Davies, Terry Camilleri, Deborah Mailman, Stephen Kearney, Tegan Higginbotham, Frank Woodley, Dave Lawson

When it comes to family movies, Australian movie makers tend to imbue their releases with a wistful, heartwarming feel that is at odds with the kind of syrupy, sentimental and ultimately cloying approach of their US brethrens. Movies such as Babe (1995) and The Black Balloon (2008), while tonally different, are nevertheless terrific examples of the ways in which Australian movie makers approach these kinds of movies, and don’t underestimate their target audience. Make the kids happy – absolutely; but don’t forget to add stuff for the adults.

At first glance, Oddball looks as if it’s going to fit alongside Babe and The Black Balloon quite easily. Taking its cue from the true story of the efforts to save the dwindling little penguin population on Middle Island, a rocky outcrop off the coast of Australia’s Victoria State, the movie wastes no time in outlining the problem: the penguins are at the mercy of marauding foxes who have learned that they can cross from the mainland and wreak as much havoc as they like. With the penguins’ numbers decreasing rapidly, the island’s status as a sanctuary is in jeopardy.

The sanctuary is overseen by dedicated conservationist Emily Marsh (Snook). Fearful of seeing the penguins’ eradicated once and for all, she is losing all hope of finding a solution. With the mating season approaching she needs the numbers to stay at ten or above; if the count at that time is anything less the sanctuary closes and she loses her job. But when her father, an eccentric chicken farmer nicknamed Swampy (Jacobson) rescues an injured penguin and takes it home with him to recuperate, the attentions of a fox leads to the revelation that his dog, Oddball, has a natural aptitude for protecting the penguins.

There’s a problem, though. Oddball is effectively under house arrest after his boisterous nature causes mayhem (and some considerable damage) in Warrnambool, the local town. Confined to his master’s chicken farm, Oddball’s presence on the island would be frowned upon, so Swampy elects to put his effectiveness to the test by himself and in secret. Oddball’s first night is a success, which leads Swampy to enlist the help of his granddaughter, Olivia (Gillies), in keeping his plan a secret from Emily. (You could ask why he really needs to do this but you’d still be waiting for an answer once the movie has ended.) With the decline in the penguin population halted, and Emily finding out anyway quite soon after, Oddball’s nightly watch continues.

Inevitably, things take a turn for the worse. A mystery saboteur incapacitates Oddball and releases a fox onto the island. The number of penguins left drops to nine. With little doubt that the saboteur will return the next night to wipe out the penguins completely, the discovery of an egg that will bring the count up to ten and save the sanctuary, makes it even more important that the saboteur is stopped.

While Oddball, both the dog and the movie, are friendly and quite endearing in their own way, and while the penguins’ plight is affecting, the truth is that Oddball doesn’t really work. It’s a disappointing realisation to make, because all the elements are in place to ensure that it does work, but thanks to Stuart McDonald’s pedestrian direction and Peter Ivan’s depth-free script, the movie meanders through redundant scene after redundant scene offering little more than gorgeous shots of the Victoria coastline – beautifully framed and shot by DoP Damian Wyvill – and occasional bursts of humour that raise a smile (but none that linger). It’s a movie that quickly settles for doing just enough to get by.

Elsewhere, the movie relies on poorly realised and developed characters who interact with each other in ways that are entirely baffling. Chief amongst these is Tudyk’s awkwardly imported Yank, Bradley Slater, tasked with putting Warrnambool on the map tourist-wise and being Emily’s choice of partner (what happened to Olivia’s father is never mentioned, something else you might wonder about but will never get the answer to). Bradley is a source of amusement throughout, but of the kind that makes the viewer want to reach into the screen and slap him for behaving so idiotically. He’s afraid of Swampy for no apparent reason other than that Swampy doesn’t like him (and yes, you don’t find out why). And he behaves in a predictably cowardly fashion when a subplot involving a whale watching centre being built on the island if the sanctuary closes, puts him in a difficult situation with Emily. Tudyk is a talented actor, but here his sojourn Down Under hasn’t done him any favours.

Luckily for Tudyk though, his character is a secondary one. Hogging most of the screen time and working through his entire repertoire of facial tics and bewildered expressions, Jacobson, who made such a great impression in Kenny (2006), plays the real life Swampy Marsh as if he were only occasionally united with his full faculties; a kindly, irresponsible old man who comes good by accident. The real Swampy Marsh has an associate producer credit on the movie, so it’s likely he wasn’t entirely upset with Jacobson’s portrayal of him, but there are moments when you have to wonder if McDonald was even on set when certain scenes were being filmed, so painfully “humorous” is Jacobson’s performance.

For much of its running time, Oddball is too reminiscent of the kind of Disney-backed teen movie that offers ninety minutes of saccharine-drenched “entertainment”, and which leaves the viewer feeling drained of any remaining will to live. It has little to say beyond its obvious ecological message, and spends most of its time being defiantly innocuous, while wasting its cast’s time and effort. With much of Australia’s recent output proving so lacklustre, Oddball can be seen as yet another project where the very attributes that make Australian movies so distinctive and so richly rewarding are abandoned in favour of an unnecessarily bland, “let’s please the international market” approach. By the movie’s end you could be forgiven for thinking that the penguins’ plight is a metaphor for Australian cinema itself – but not necessarily with a happy ending to look forward to.

Rating: 4/10 – seriously disappointing, Oddball is superficially amusing and enjoyable only if you leave any expectations behind at the door; beautiful to look at but otherwise an empty shell, the movie, like its penguins, never takes flight and remains resolutely grounded, both dramatically and comedically.

Jessabelle (2014)

27 Saturday Dec 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Ghost, Horror, Joelle Carter, Kevin Greutert, Louisiana, Mark Webber, Review, Sarah Snook, Tarot cards, Thriller, Wheelchair bound

D: Kevin Greutert / 90m

Cast: Sarah Snook, Joelle Carter, Mark Webber, David Andrews, Ana de la Reguera, Amber Stevens, Chris Ellis

Following a car accident that kills her fiancé and leaves her paralysed from the waist down, Jessie (Snook) goes to recuperate at what was her parents’ house but is now just her dad’s, her mother (Carter) having died from cancer when Jessie was very young. She’s given her mother’s room, and settles in, but her dad (Andrews) is distant and not very supportive. One day, Jessie discovers a number of old video tapes in a box labelled “Jessabelle”. When she plays one she finds herself watching her mother playing with a deck of Tarot cards and talking to “Jessabelle”. Jessie thinks her mother means her, but some of what she says doesn’t relate to Jessie at all. When her dad finds out about the tape he gets angry and destroys it; he also throws her wheelchair into the nearby lake.

The next day he apologises and gives Jessie her mother’s old wheelchair so that she can still get about. When he goes out she watches another tape; on it her mother mentions a man named Moses. On the next day, Jessie is helped into a bath by a physiotherapist. She falls asleep, and the bath begins to fill with blood. When Jessie wakes she finds the ghost of a girl a few years younger than her in the bath with her. The ghost (Stevens) attacks Jessie but when she screams and her dad bursts in, the ghost disappears, as if it was all an hallucination. Her dad finds the other tape and tries to burn both of them but he gets locked in his shed and burns to death.

At her dad’s funeral, Jessie is reunited with an old flame, Preston (Webber). She confides in him about the tapes, and although he’s married he promises to help her as much as he can. Jessie later finds more tapes, one of which contains her mother telling “Jessabelle” that she’s already dead. Things take a strange turn when Jessie and Preston discover an infant’s grave in the bayou, an infant named Jessabelle. They alert the police and the remains are taken away to be examined. Jessie and Preston also discover a shrine to the man known as Moses but are warned away from it. Echoes of the past begin to reveal themselves, and soon Jessie learns the truth about Jessabelle and her parents, and a terrible crime that was committed before she was born.

While Jessabelle attempts to bring something new to the sins of the past sub-genre of horror movies, regular viewers of this sort of thing will find it commendably low-key and sadly unambitious at the same time. The source of most viewers’ consternation will be Robert Ben Garant’s screenplay, his first proper outing in the horror field (he also wrote Hell Baby (2013) but that was more of a horror-comedy hybrid – and didn’t work in either department). Garant is better known as the writer/creator of the Night at the Museum movies, as well as being an actor, but on this occasion his enthusiasm for trying to tell a ghost story that isn’t as derivative as all the rest, is the one thing that actually gets him – and the movie – into trouble.

From the moment Jessie arrives at her childhood home it’s clear that her dad’s behaviour towards her is borne out of guilt over something he’s done in the past, and while this type of relationship isn’t exactly unusual in horror movies, here it’s more awkward than usual thanks to the script’s refusal to portray him as anything other than angry and scornful – which in light of what we discover he’s done, actually makes him appear self-deluded and cruel; it also makes the viewer wonder why Jessabelle’s vengeful spirit hasn’t killed him already. The mother’s appearance is problematic as well, her graduation from early video blogger to phantom presence in the movie’s final quarter being needed not to provide any unexpected scares but to explain the plot amid a welter of artless exposition.

The answer to the mystery of Jessabelle and the tapes Jessie’s mother recorded, when it comes, is as underwhelming as the relationship between Jessie and Preston, an attempt at romance that even stops the plot long enough for them to end up between the sheets. The clues that lead to the discovery of Jessabelle’s identity are so heavily signposted it’s like playing connect-the-dots (and there’s only three dots to be connected). Again, Garant’s script wants to appear more clever than it is, but lets itself down time after time with weak scares and even weaker plot developments (experienced viewers will have worked out what’s going on long before Jessabelle shows up in the bath).

Things aren’t helped by Greutert’s disinterested direction, nor Michael Fimognari’s pedestrian camerawork, reducing the beautiful North Carolina locations to gloomy backdrops. The performances aren’t that convincing either, with only Snook offering anything like a commitment to her character, making Jessie far more sympathetic than she has any right to be (she’s the most likeable character in a movie that makes it extra hard to root for anyone). And with an ending that is as predictable as it is entirely derivative, Jessabelle winds up disappointing far more than it entertains.

Rating: 3/10 – stupid is as stupid does – a phrase that applies to so many horror movies that it’s embarrassing, and Jessabelle does nothing to avoid being added to the list; despite Garant’s efforts this is dispiriting stuff indeed, and with only Snook’s performance to warrant a viewing, can be consigned to the so-bad-it’s-bad list of recent horror movies without a moment’s hesitation.

Predestination (2014)

29 Saturday Nov 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Drama, Ethan Hawke, Fizzle Bomber, Noah Taylor, Review, Sarah Snook, Sci-fi, Spacecorp, The Spierig Brothers, Thriller, Time travel

D: The Spierig Brothers / 97m

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Sarah Snook, Noah Taylor, Christopher Kirby, Cate Wolfe, Ben Prendergast, Freya Stafford

A man enters a building and heads for the basement where the boiler is housed. There he finds an explosive device that’s counting down to its detonation. Just as he is about to stop the bomb from detonating he is shot at and injured. He makes one last attempt to save the building and the people inside it, but is badly burnt in the process. In desperation, he reaches for what looks like a violin case, but it’s just out of reach. Then someone pushes it closer, the man is able to push some buttons on the case… and he vanishes. When he wakes up he’s in a hospital recovering from severe burns to his face and throat. So bad were the man’s injuries, the doctors have had to carry out extensive reconstructive surgery, and he’s advised that the pitch of his voice will be very different than before.

The man (Hawke) is a temporal agent, able to travel back and forth in time within fifty-three years of 1981, the year in which time travel is achieved. Working for a secret organisation, his task – as before – is to track down and eliminate the so-called Fizzle Bomber, a terrorist responsible for several arson attacks in the Sixties and Seventies, but whose greatest “achievement” was the murder of 11,000 people in a massive explosion in New York City in 1975. Accepting one last chance to stop the Fizzle Bomber, the agent travels back from 1985 to 1978 and finds work in a bar. One night a young man comes in who reveals himself to be a writer of true confessions stories. The agent challenges him to tell the best story he knows.

The young man begins by telling the agent that when he was a girl he was abandoned by his parents on the steps of an orphanage when he was just a baby; he was named Jane. Growing up healthy and fit, and with a fierce intellect, he was precocious and headstrong. As a teenager he tried to join an organisation called Spacecorp which trained future astronauts but an anomaly discovered during a physical meant he had to leave the programme. At a night class, he met a man and fell pregnant. The child, a girl, was born by Caesarean, and afterwards one of his doctors (Pendergast) explained to him that his internal organs were both male and female, and that they’d made the decision to remove the female organs and set him on the path to becoming a man. And if that wasn’t enough to deal with, his child was abducted a few days later and never seen again. Eventually moving to New York City, he found he had a knack for writing true confessions-style magazine articles, and now here he is. The agent is unimpressed however, and reveals that he’s known who the man is all along. The man believes he’s being scammed, but when the agent tells him that he can help him kill the man who got him pregnant (and presumably stole their child), the man is sufficiently intrigued to agree to whatever the agent has in mind.

With such a lengthy back story, Predestination has the look and feel of a convoluted soap opera, its abandoned/stolen babies and sex change protagonist the kind of thing that is so open to parody and ridicule it risks losing its audience’s involvement from the moment the writer mentions being born a girl. But the premise is played out in such a straight, deliberate fashion that what might be loosely termed “a tall story” soon proves to have more depth than is readily obvious. As the writer embarks on his quest for revenge he finds himself drawn into a world of time travel, unexpected twists and turns, temporal paradoxes, and the mystery of the Fizzle Bomber.

What happens before the scene in the bar is repeated later in the movie, while what happens after the scene in the bar sees the agent and the writer separating and converging in ways that neither they nor (hopefully) the audience are able to predict. Adapted from the short story All You Zombies by Robert A. Heinlein – a copy of his novel Stranger in a Strange Land can be seen on the writer’s desk at one point – Predestination is a mostly faithful retelling of Heinlein’s tale, and keeps the time travel paradox that unites the main characters. Outwardly complex and confusing, the movie isn’t actually that difficult to follow, but it does its best to obscure matters (mostly by having the agent make several seemingly unconnected “jumps” in the final third), and creators the Spierig Brothers (Michael and Peter) have fun providing just enough misdirection to complicate matters when necessary. But while it all adds up to an occasionally challenging viewing experience, and it holds the attention for most of its running time, sadly the movie doesn’t quite become more than the sum of its parts.

Part of this is due to the central time travel paradox, a clever conceit on paper, but not so reasonable when portrayed on film. That it breaks one of the biggest taboos ever regarding time travel is at first impressive, but then as the plot unfolds and things fall into place, the movie takes that taboo and pretty much tramples all over it. It’s actually hard to work out if Heinlein’s original concept was as well thought out as it might have been, or if the Spierigs have taken the idea a step too far (certainly the ending is modified from the original). In either case the movie begins to stumble over itself in the final third as it seeks a satisfactory conclusion. What it comes up with, though bold in itself, is not as dramatically rewarding as was perhaps intended, and some viewers may feel short changed by the nihilism employed.

With the story losing its way, the cast have a greater struggle on their hands than just remembering where they are in any given scene. There are emotional arcs here that need to be maintained, and character motivations that need to be reliably and consistently adhered to, and thanks to decisive performances from Hawke and Snook, this is largely the case, but even they are unable to offset the emphasis on overly clever plotting that hampers the last thirty minutes. Taylor has a more shadowy role as the head of the time travel agency, and while he maintains an air of inscrutability throughout, his appearances are too few to provide any real answers as to what is going on.

The various time frames and locations are kept to a generic minimum, with only costume changes and/or cars to herald the period the characters find themselves in, and the score and song choices are integrated into these scenes with aplomb. The look and style of the movie is fairly gloomy, and the camerawork by Ben Nott isn’t as fluid as perhaps was needed, though the Spierigs show a knack for effective medium shots that contain a lot of visual information for the viewer to ponder on. It’s not an attractive movie to watch for the most part, but the look of the movie is consistent, and it certainly fits the mood of the piece.

Rating: 7/10 – an intriguing idea given a progressively rougher handling than necessary, Predestination is still a valiant attempt at an intelligent science fiction story, and for that reason, shouldn’t be overlooked; a movie that sees Hawke and Snook on fine form, this also has a great sense of its own tragedy, and bravely takes its time in setting up the main storyline.