Published 2017 on Down Under Flix
This week brings one last look at Australian comedies from the noughties, no doubt to some readers’ reflief and other readers’ chagrin. Previous entries grouped films according to theme – romantic comedies, music-centred comedies, small town comedies, with The Wannabes straddling the former two categories – but this week spotlights the three best films (in my opinion anyway) of the series: a sly little comedic thriller, a road movie dramedy headlined by two iconic Australian comedy stars, and a polished mainstream confection.
Under the Radar
Director: Evan Clarry
Stars: Nathan Phillips, Clayton Watson, Steady Eddy, Chloe Maxwell
Twentysomething Brandon (Nathan Phillips) is an immature surfing champion forced into community service after a run-in with the law. Looking for a way to shirk his duties at a home for the disabled and attend a surf competition, he proposes taking Adrian (Clayton Watson), who suffers a memory loss condition, on an excursion to the beach. On their trip – saddled with Trevor (Steady Eddy) who has cerebral palsy and hitchhiker Jo (Chloe Maxwell) who they pick up along the way – they stumble across some criminal activity and end up fending for their lives.
While Under the Radar’s poster (scroll up) suggests breezy comedic hijinks, the film opens like a straight thriller. Kicking off in media res, Adrian is pursued by criminals, captured, bound and threatened, with Brandon dragged into the mix shortly thereafter. From here, the film flashes back and subsequently alternates between prior events, played for laughs, and current events, with the characters under considerable duress. Where the thriller elements in some comedies feel shoehorned in or superficial (see, for example, The Wannabes or Three Men and a Baby), the approach adopted here adds grit and tension to the story and some sense of danger and stakes, which the comedy flashbacks then serve to decompress. The presence of Phillips, star of both Wolf Creek and Dying Breed, only heightens the sense that everything could go terribly, violently wrong.
Phillips has starred in some bad films, particularly some bad comedies (Take Away is a tough sit, and by all accounts You and Your Stupid Mate is abominable) but he’s done good work in good films (Australian Rules, Wolf Creek, Balibo) and is a solid lead here. Maxwell is also good and received a Best Actress AFI nomination for her role, a rarity for this sort of film (though admittedly it was a pretty slim year at the AFI Awards). But the standouts are Watson, conveying both resilience and vulnerability as the endangered Adrian, and comedian Steady Eddie, who cuts into the part and through his real-life cerebral palsy with sardonic mirth. Whilst Under the Radar is slighter than this week’s other featured films and not necessarily built to last, it’s a comedy with refreshing grit and for its runtime is engaging, at times gripping viewing.
Charlie & Boots
Director: Dean Murphy
Stars: Paul Hogan, Shane Jacobson
Our last batch of reviews spotlighted 2004’s Strange Bedfellows, in which iconic Crocodile Dundee star Paul Hogan teamed onscreen with The Castle’s Michael Caton. Charlie & Boots teams Hogan with another popular Australian comedy star, Kenny’s Shane Jacobson, as well as reuniting him with Strange Bedfellows writer-director Dean Murphy and co-writer Stewart Faichney. Whilst teaming Crocodile Dundee with Kenny is the sort of high concept that may cause some viewers to break out in hives, to this viewer’s eyes it is, like Hogan and Caton, a sound pairing and one I’d welcome more of.
Hogan plays Charlie, recently widowed and withdrawn from the world. Jacobson plays his son Boots, with whom he has a complicated relationship. In an effort to lift his father’s morose spirits, Boots takes Charlie on a road trip from Warrnambool, Victoria to Cape York, Queensland. For non-Australian readers, that’s from the bottom end of Australia to the top end, a journey of over 4,100 kilometres.
The road movie is one of those resilient, dog-eared sub-genres, and with good reason. It transports audiences to new and distant places, but there’s also something comforting and reassuring about its familiar narrative beats, with characters in moving vehicles hitting the road, growing as individuals, forging or rekindling meaningful relationships, and so on. The genre is an American specialty (see It Happened One Night, National Lampoon’s Vacation, Rain Man, Thelma & Louise, to name just a few) and Australia, though under-represented in contrast, also affords filmmakers vast distances and impressive landscapes to use as their canvas. Some notable Australian road movies have already been covered on Down Under Flix – see Beneath Clouds and Bondi Tsunami – and other noteworthy entries in Australia’s road movie output include dramas like Last Cab to Darwin, Spider and Rose and Backroads, comedies such as The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Doing Time for Patsy Cline, and thrillers like the delightful Roadgames.
Charlie & Boots is a nice addition to that canon. While it charms as a travelogue, its core ingredient is the chemistry between Hogan and Jacobson, who forego their typically broader comic personas and pitch their characters at a lower key, finding comedy and pathos in gentler human exchanges. I was particularly impressed by Hogan, portraying a regular melancholic guy rather than working to his usual larrikin persona and convincingly conveying Charlie’s grief and mourning. Charlie & Boots ultimately errs towards convention and doesn’t break from its road movie formula, but it’s a beautifully played example of formula filmmaking delivering the goods.
A Few Best Men
Director: Stephan Elliot
Stars: Xavier Samuel, Kris Marshall, Kevin Bishop, Tim Draxl,
Laura Brent, Olivia Newton-John, Rebel Wilson, Steve Le Marquand
A
Few Best Men is
another terrific example of formula filmmaking that works. But where Charlie & Boots is a
soothing chamomile tea of a film, A
Few Best Men is a six-pack of Jolt Cola, with all the sugar
and twice the caffeine. Londoner David (Xavier Samuel) meets and falls in love
with Australian Mia (Laura Brent) over the course of 10 days at an island
paradise. David returns to a wet, miserable England not unlike the one depicted
in Bruce Beresford’s Barry
McKenzie films 40 years earlier, and tells his best friends –
swaggering confidante Tom (Kris Marshall), neurotic Graham (Kevin Bishop) and
sad sack Luke (Tim Draxl) – that he’s engaged to be married. The quartet fly to
Australia for the wedding, to be held at Mia’s family’s home in the Blue
Mountains region of New South Wales. Following a wild bucks’ night, disaster
upon disaster ensues on David and Mia’s big day.
This
review coincides with the theatrical release of A Few Best Men’s sequel, A Few Less Men, which has been
on the receiving end of a critical bludgeoning, with its Rotten Tomatoes score
currently sitting at 17%. Having said that, the original doesn’t rank any
better on the Tomatometer, sitting a notch below at 16% (see Rotten Tomatoes). While I can’t speak for the sequel (which I’m yet to see), in
the case of A Few Best
Men there’s a clear disjunction between critics and filmgoers.
Of the thirteen comedies covered in this month-plus series, A Few Best Men was the
most commercially successful, and ranks 57th on the list of
the 100 most successful Australian films (Strange
Bedfellows, Charlie
& Boots, and BoyTown also
crack the list at numbers 63, 75, and 88 respectively). The fact that the film
warranted a sequel suggests there’s an audience that dug it: whilst Hollywood
routinely produces sequels to films nobody was particularly crazy about in the
first instance – see last year’s Inferno and The Hunstman: Winter’s War and
the forthcoming Escape Plan
2: Hades – in Australia a film typically has to be held in
high affection to score a follow-up (whether that follow-up lives up to its
predecessor, or audiences repay the effort with enthusiasm, is another story).
Any
fandom for A Few Best Men is
well-deserved. While it won’t be for all tastes or to all comedic mileages, I
found the film a consistently funny, occasionally hilarious piece of populist
product, expertly helmed by Stephan Elliot, director of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the
Desert and Welcome
to Woop Woop, the film that launched Down Under Flix. Whilst lacking those films’ thematic meat and sophistication
– Priscilla was
sly and subversive in its cultural and gender politics, while Woop Woop both venerated
and eviscerated national identity – A
Few Best Men shares their vulgar spirit, zippy soundtracks
(including co-star Olivia Newton-John handling the film’s closing song), great
scenery (the Blue Mountain vistas look suitably imposing onscreen and convey
Mia’s family’s affluence), and sugar high sensibility. It also showcases, if
further proof were needed, that Elliot is ace at timing and landing a joke. At
times A Few Best Men feels
like a greatest hits package of modern mainstream comedy, taking and
repackaging ingredients from other successful contemporary comedies like The Hangover, Meet the Parents, The Wedding Crashers, and
writer Dean Craig’s own Death
at a Funeral, but the film never pauses long enough for a feeling
of derivativeness to creep in. Craig is arguably the film’s other secret weapon
alongside Elliot: like Death
at a Funeral, A
Few Best Men sets up and executes gags and gasp-out-loud moments
at a swift and steady clip, each rooted firmly in characterisation.
Those
characters may test some viewers: they’re an exasperating assortment and their
own biggest obstacles, but the actors are uniformly committed and energetic.
While Xavier Samuel had the misfortune of being a featured player in the Twilight saga, he’s done
solid work in local genre fare like Bait and The Loved Ones and
is a good comic everyman, overcoming the fact his character teeters permanently
on the verge of judgmental hysteria. Kris Marshall, meanwhile, overcomes the
fact his character is a borderline sociopath and makes for an affable worst
best man. Kevin Bishop (formerly Jim Hawkins in Muppet Treasure Island, for all
you fellow Muppeteers) and Trim Draxl (of Swimming Upstream) round out the quartet nicely, and Laura Brent is likeable as
the besieged bride. In addition, Olivia Newton-John, Rebel Wilson, and Steve Le
Marquand provide robust support as Mia’s increasingly intoxicated mother, Mia’s
sister, and a local drug dealer with abandonment issues respectively. Suffice
to say, if you ever wanted to see Sandy from Grease being potty-mouthed and under the
influence, A Few Best Men is
for you.
On
the DVD’s special features, Elliot states that he “was just in the mood for a
laugh” following work on a period film (Easy
Virtue) and in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. A Few Best Men delivers on
that promise: it’s funny, slick, mainstream comedic confectionery, thematically
lightweight but fattening in other ways.
Final thoughts...
In the first post of this month-plus series of comedy reviews, I painted Australian
comedies of the noughties in a somewhat disparaging light. I noted that the
major Australian comedies of the 1970s, like the Alvin Purple and Barry McKenzie films,
rejoiced in their newly fangled opportunity to present Australian identities on
film and embraced adult material thanks to the liberal attitudes of the time;
that the major Australian comedies of the 1980s, like Crocodile Dundee and Young Einstein,
commodified that identity for global audiences; that the major Australian
comedies of the 1990s gave voice and expression to misfits and outcasts and
everyday suburbanites; and that the comedies of the 2000s, on first glance,
possessed no equivalent holistic identity of their own. Following a month-plus
of reviews spanning thirteen films from the period (and thereabouts) my new
take on local comedies of the noughties and their thematic and cultural import
is as follows:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To
clarify: I generally enjoyed these films, some more than expected. The ones I
didn’t care for, like The
Wannabes, I can’t really muster up the energy to actively hate. My
biggest criticism across the thirteen flicks would be a general lack of ambition
and originality; nobody’s really experimenting or being bold or swinging for
the fences. And, like I said, there doesn’t seem to be any collective vision or
uniform thesis underpinning this assortment of titles.
In
my meager defence, we’re perhaps still too close to the decade to elucidate
these comedies’ collective import. Certainly, thirteen films do not paint the
whole portrait: key pieces of the puzzle may reside elsewhere, perhaps in films
like Kenny or Kath & Kimderella that
were much more lucrative financially, or films like Let’s Get Skase or You Can’t Stop the Murders that
have largely faded from the cultural consciousness. Or maybe there’s no
holistic identity to be elucidated across these texts, a distinct possibility
that’s perfectly fine and somewhat symptomatic of an increasingly fragmented
popular culture with increasingly varied modes of consumption and expression
and identity.
However,
these films do share some connective tissue, with recurring cast members and
casting patterns across the thirteen flicks. Several actors appear more than
once, such as Paul Hogan (Strange
Bedfellows, Charlie
& Boots), Stephen Curry (Thunderstruck, The Nugget), Kestie Morassi (Thunderstruck, Charlie & Boots), Roy
Billing (Thunderstruck, Strange Bedfellows, Charlie & Boots), Alan
Cassell (Wally Norman, Strange Bedfellows), and Ryan
Johnson (Thunderstruck, The Wannabes). Imported actors
are also commonplace: see Dennis Hopper, Melanie Griffith, and David Hemmings (The Night We Called It a Day),
Rhys Ifans (Danny Deckchair),
the delightful Peter Dinklage (I
Love You Too), and Pete Postlethwaite (Strange Bedfellows). These comedy casts are
rounded out by TV, radio, and stand-up comedy personalities – some involved in
generating the material (BoyTown’s
Mick Molloy, I Love You Too’s
Peter Helliar) and others simply starring (BoyTown’s
Glenn Robbins, Under the
Radar’s Steady Eddie, Wally
Norman’s Shaun Micallef and Greg Pickhaver, to name a few) – and
garnished with Home &
Away alumni, including the late Belinda Emmett (The Nugget), Isla Fisher (The Wannabes), Anthony Phelan (Danny Deckchair), and Cinis
again (A Few Best Men).
In
addition, these thirteen films do have a number of recurring themes and motifs.
Small towns were the stomping grounds of The Honourable Wally Norman, Strange Bedfellows, The Nugget, and Danny Deckchair, while regional
politics drove the plot of Wally
Norman and surfaced in subplots in Danny Deckchair and A Few Best Men (with
real-life politicians Mike Rann and Alan Cinis showing up in small roles
in Wally Norman and A Few Best Men respectively).
Mateship and male camaraderie are staples of Australian cinema, and those
themes could be found across BoyTown, Thunderstruck, I Love You Too, A Few Best Men, The Nugget, and Strange Bedfellows, to name the
most overt examples. In particular, mates holding each other back, falling in
and out of each other’s favour, experiencing tensions due to the women in their
lives, and combinations of these tropes appear frequently (unfortunately, in
many of these comedies women are relegated to the roles of wives and girlfriends
and mothers and potential love interests; the bulk of these thirteen films
probably wouldn’t pass the Bechdel Test). Battlers also feature prominently – see Danny Deckchair, The Nugget, Wally Norman, Strange Bedfellows – and
fish out of water scenarios are also commonplace: Londoners in Australia (A Few Best Men), city folk in
country towns (Danny Deckchair),
straight men pretending to be gay (Strange
Bedfellows), men and women inhabiting each other’s bodies (Dating the Enemy), small-time
criminals catapulted to fame as children’s entertainers (The Wannabes), Frank Sinatra in
Australia (The Night We Called It
a Day), and so on. Perhaps the grand unifying theme of these
thirteen films is that white Australian men are confused and don’t know what to
do with themselves, but because they’re white Australian men they still get to
headline all the films. Maybe Fight
Club was right. In retrospect, it is quite shocking how
thoroughly white and thoroughly masculine these films and their preoccupations
are…
Like
I said, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ben Kooyman