| COLD TURKEY, SMALL FRY : Rowan Woods' 'Little Fish' [3/10] |
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| Sunday, 03 September 2006 | |
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Rowan Woods' 1998 The Boys was one of the best Australian films of the decade: a tightly-constructed, deeply unsettling drama featuring a sensational performance from David Wenham as the sociopathic, misanthropic, psychopathic 'black sheep' of a dysfunctional, working-class family from the Sydney suburbs. Wenham looked set to become the Next Big Thing from Down Under - but it was his co-star Toni Collette who made the transition to high-profile roles in Hollywood and beyond. Woods, meanwhile, dropped off the cinematic map, instead working steadily on small-screen projects. Expectations were very high, then, when it was announced that he was to return to film-making with Little Fish, assembling a high-calibre cast including Cate Blanchett, Martin Henderson, Guy Pearce, Sam Neill and Aussie veteran character-actress Noni Hazlehurt. Sad to say, Little Fish is one of the year's most frustrating disappointments. The ostentatiously low-key tale of a dysfunctional, working-class family in the Sydney suburbs, it's a character-based piece which for the most part operates in a much quieter key from The Boys - until a belated and somewhat unvoncinving lurch into murderous violence. The first sign of trouble is that the main character is named 'Tracy Heart' - the second that she works in a video-store named 'Paradise': indications that Jacqueline Perske's script (she had no input into The Boys) is going to favour clunky irony instead of subtle complexity. A former drug addict, 32-year-old Tracy (played by 36-year-old Blanchett) is determined to make a go of her life. Her business aspirations require a bank-loan - but the institutions she approaches are put off by her chequered past. Providing further complications are her somewhat feckless, drug-dealing brother Ray (Henderson) and her ex-boyfriend Jonny (Dustin Nguyen), who shows up after several years abroad - while lurking in the background are washed-up former sports-star Lionel (Weaving) and the suave, shady, bisexual business bigwig known as 'The Jockey' (Sam Neill)... It's easy to see what has attracted such notable names to such a 'small', indie-flavoured project: these are juicy parts, offering much scope for overwrought, awards-friendly emoting as the characters clash, stew over past grievances, mull over their mistakes and missed opportunities. For the audience, however, these episodes feel like actors' exercises in search of a proper screenplay structure - one which never really seems like materialising: the plotting is murky, the 'twists' clunky, the pacing sluggish. The real 'events' seem to have taken place years, perhaps even decades before: what we're witnessing is very much the burnt-out aftermath, and it doesn't help our understanding or empathy that the ages of the main characters don't quite seem to add up (the relationship between Lionel and Tracy is particularly confusing.) Woods, meanwhile, seems to content to recycle the moody, seedy nocturnes that seemed so fresh and ominous in The Boys - his use of slow-motion is repetitive and uninspired, while the sunspangled waterside flashbacks which bookend the picture represent an especially dispiriting resort to threadbare cliche. Though we feel every second of the film's two hours, it isn't an entirely worthless experience: the fact that Jonny comes from a Vietnamese background adds a rare fresh element (though one that doesn't really go anywhere), while Neill elevates proceedings whenever his sushi-munching, permatanned, blow-dried Mr Big is on screen. He glides through proceedings as though he's part of a sparklingly sinister neo-noir: a pity that whatever once existed of such a picture seems long-lost among the rewrites. It feels as though Perske and Woods don't want to dirty their hands with anything so sordid as a thriller: they're aiming for classier, more harrowing terrain - only to bog down in a mulch of torpid, grim inertia. Neil Young 20th August / 3rd September 2006 LITTLE FISH : [3/10] : Australia 2005 : Rowan WOODS : 114 mins (BBFC timing) seen at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), 8th August 2006 - public show (paid £5.20) |
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