Published 2017 on Down Under Flix
The Big Steal
Stars: Ben Mendelsohn, Claudia Karvan, Steve Bisley, Marshall Napier, Maggie King, Damon Herriman, Angelo D’Angelo
As someone who doesn’t own a car, I’m fairly oblivious when it comes to cars and car culture. Even so, anyone who’s ever watched a handful of teen movies will recognise the prominent role of cars and the social cachets and personal freedoms they bestow in rites-of-passage films, from Rebel Without a Cause to American Graffiti to Grease to Dazed and Confused and beyond. Even the first act of Transformers hinges largely around protagonist Sam Witwicky’s (Shia LaBeouf) bond with his new car, before switching priorities to pyrotechnics and robots thwacking each other about.
The Big Steal has roots in this fertile storytelling soil. Teenager and lifelong Jaguar fan Danny (Ben Mendelsohn) inherits his parents’ old-fashioned family car on his birthday. Danny longs to date classmate Joanna (Claudia Karvan), and when he finally musters the courage to ask her out he lies and tells her he has a Jaguar. To avoid embarrassment, he trades in his birthday car—much to the disappointment of his eccentric parents (Marshall Napier and Maggie King)—as down payment for a Jaguar. However, he makes the mistake of buying from shonky dealer Gordon Farkas (Steve Bisley), who swindles him with a sub-par engine. Consequently, Danny must steal back his rightful engine, retain Joanna’s affections, and heal relations with his parents.
Nadia Tass’s film is a teen comedy romance with a dollop of thriller and plenty of charm. In my review of The Year my Voice Broke (read here), another Australian rites-of-passage film featuring a young Ben Mendelsohn, I alluded to the tradition of Australian teen flicks including that film, Puberty Blues, The Crossing, and more recently Jasper Jones. The Big Steal is a bit closer to something like Starstruck (read here), not only by virtue of its contemporary setting, but its cross-pollination with another genre and its trappings (the musical in Starstruck’s case, the heist film in The Big Steal’s) which gives it a bit more propulsion than those other, somewhat more languid efforts. Like Armstrong’s film, The Big Steal is zippy and frisky and mainstream, with only the thinnest veneer of adolescent angst. It also shares some DNA with the American teen films of the same era, notably John Hughes’ work: Mendelsohn’s Danny is sculpted from the same nerdy kid mould as Anthony Michael Hall and his ilk, while the movie romantically pairs teens from opposing wealthy and working-class homes ala Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful.
While its setting was contemporaneous to its time of production, as with most modern-set teen films the passage of time has rendered The Big Steal a time capsule. Viewers of similar vintage can thus enjoy the film as a nostalgia trip to early 1990s Melbourne, a time both more innocent and simultaneously more risqué (it’s also something of a generational checkpoint, with Danny a second-generation Australian son of ‘Ten Pound Pom’ parents who immigrated to Australia under the Assisted Passage Migration Scheme). Nostalgia can also be squeezed from the presence of the young Mendelsohn and Karvan, actors that Australian audiences have literally watched grow up onscreen over three decades. Where other Mendelsohn films covered on Down Under Flix have exploited the tension between his innate likability and gift for playing unsympathetic or conflicted characters (see the aforementioned The Year My Voice Broke and particularly Metal Skin), here he gets to play thoroughly likable and sympathetic, while Karvan’s youthful star wattage is on full display. Also terrific are Steve Bisley—an actor widely identified with vehicular hijinks in Australian films thanks to his roles in Mad Max and The Chain Reaction—as the ultimate shonky greaseball, a performance that earned him a Best Supporting Actor AFI Award, and Marshall Napier and Maggie King as Danny’s eccentric parents.
Side note to all Melbournians: The Big Steal is screening at Melbourne International Film Festival as part of a program celebrating Australian women directors. Check it out and check for details here.
Mr Reliable
Stars: Colin Friels, Jacqueline McKenzie, Jonathan Hardy, Susie
Porter
The
Big Steal was
directed and co-produced by Tass and written by her husband David Parker, who
also co-produced and served as Director of Photography. This filmmaking duo
enjoyed earlier success on 1986’s award-winning Malcolm, and would re-team
with Malcolm’s
star Colin Friels a decade later on Mr
Reliable, with Tass again directing and Parker serving as
cinematographer. Set in 1968 and billed as “The incredible true story of
Australia’s first and only hostage crisis” (a rather sweeping
generalisation: Ned Kelly anyone?), the film centres on Wally
Mellish (Colin Friels), recently released from prison and returned to his
hometown Glenfield, 40 kilometres southwest of Sydney. Wally shacks up with old
acquaintance Beryl (Jacqueline McKenzie) and her infant child, but can’t quite
curb his criminal ways and steals hood ornaments to decorate their new home.
When police visit Wally’s house and wrongly deduce that Beryl and her son are
hostages, this triggers a media circus and mass police presence around Wally’s
property, trapping the initially baffled and subsequently frustrated couple
indoors.
The
poster at the top of this review accompanied the film’s DVD release, and conveys a very
different tone to the original, somewhat more Welcome to Woop Woop-esque poster below.
These
two very different tones are reflected in the film itself. As per its narrative
hook, the film begins as a comedy of errors, milking humour from the police’s
confusion and from Wally and Beryl’s bewilderment. It’s a fine balancing act
keeping these threads believable, and in less deft hands Mr Reliable could have
tipped over into broad farce and created audience incredulity. But Tass and
company pull off the balancing act, fashioning a dry, drolly comic look at the
absurd ala Road to Nhill and Love Serenade, two other films
of similar vintage.
Subsequently,
as the stakes escalate, the film generates dramatic heft. A co-producer and
co-scripter on the project was Terry Hayes, a writer with a knack for
elucidating the dramatic potential in Australian history (he wrote on revered
miniseries such as The
Dismissal, Bodyline,
and Vietnam in
the 1980s) as well as its mythic dimension (seen in those series as well as his
two best-known co-writing credits, The
Road Warrior and Mad
Max: Beyond Thunderdome). Mr
Reliable finds some mythic resonance in its true life story,
tapping into the pro-battler, anti-police, anti-authority sentiments that
pervade much of Australian popular culture, as seen in its celebration of
counter-culture figures such as the aforementioned Ned Kelly. There’s also a
touch of Lumet’s Dog Day
Afternoon to the film, given its period setting and depiction
of a siege situation along with the police/media/public frenzy accompanying it.
The outlandish events finds sturdy, sympathetic anchors in lead actors Friels—a
veritable Mr Reliable of Australian cinema (see here)—and
the likewise consistently good McKenzie (see here).
While The Big Steal and Mr Reliable would
make a nice double feature, it’s worth noting that Mr Reliable was released
six months before another, more popular Australian film about a battler who
takes arms (albeit not literally) against harassment to protect his home, The Castle. As far as double
bills go, these films would make a fitting pair.
Ben Kooyman