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The Travellers (2025)


When I saw The Travellers in November last year, I left the theatre underwhelmed. Whilst not marketed as autobiographical, there were whiffs of an essay I'd read by its director Bruce Beresford—published in the engaging 2017 collection The Best Film I Never Made and Other Stories about a Life in the Arts—where he reminisced about visiting his ageing father in his regional hometown. Ultimately, The Travellers—about an international opera art director returning home to care for his father after his mother's passing—felt, much like Bill Bennett's The Way My Way, like a minor, low-fi, autobiographical late work by a major Australian director.

However, The Travellers has proven stickier than anticipated, and with the passage of time I've found myself thinking less about the film's flaws—its flattish digital photography, its middling lead casting—and more about its witty grace notes, its engaging supporting turns—especially Bryan Brown, reuniting with Beresford for the first time since Breaker Morant—and the themes it chews on. It's Beresford's only feature release since 2017's excellent Ladies in Black, and a film only he could have made. Some of the conversations about Australian philistinism towards art feel as dated as they did in Richard Franklin's 1995 adaptation of Hotel Sorrento—references to Colin Farrell aside—but they're clearly the sentiments of a director who has grappled with them for over fifty years in the creative industries.

I can't say I've warmed to Luke Bracey in the lead role. I liked Bracey in the muscular Hacksaw Ridge, and he fared as well as anyone could have in the pointless Point Break remake, but was unpersuasive as a jet-setting artist of global renown. My mind drifted to the possibility of someone like Ben Mendelsohn in the role, though that might've conjured unnecessary echoes of Beautiful Kate—where he previously played Brown's offspring—and perhaps Mendelsohon has too much personality to convince as the son cut from seemingly very different cloth.

So, The Travellers ... much stickier than expected. Not quite as sticky as the snowman scene from The Naked Gun remake, but few things are ...

Ben

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