Three Dollars
After seeing this film, I couldn’t help remembering a scene in the television series My So-Called Life: Angela sitting at the dinner table with her family, talking about her substitute English teacher Vic Racine, and suddenly her outburst—“An adult I can look up to. Finally.” My initial response after seeing this film?—“It’s so nice to see a film actually for adults.” By this I mean that it hasn’t earned a particular rating for its gratuitous sex&violence™ but instead is adult in that it deals with adult life: the struggle to keep certain ideals and make in some small way a success of life. At last!
There’s a lot of talk about what’s wrong with the Australian film industry. I would never have believed that Rob Conelly, the man behind the real turkey of a film The Bank (good fun, yes, but oh so contrived and throwaway) could then come back with such a lovely, sophisticated film. SO lovely and sophisticated that I feel reluctant to use the word sophisticated in case you think of the shallow, chardonnay sipping take on sophistication that is so often the case. And, by the way, in all the enumerations of the sins and downfalls of the Australian film industry, I would like to say that one thing we’ve got oh so right is the ever-present David Wenham. His turn here is no exception. (It has actually contributed substantially to my newfound ambition to hug Mr Wenham before I die…)
The film’s structure is a little more fragmented than that of the book of the same title on which it is based, Elliot Perlman’s zeitgeist moment of 1998. I think this works in the films favour—it is making the connections between the narratives of the periods each nine-and-a-half-years in a more organic way, skipping between these narratives with signposts such as hairstyle and soundtrack to let us know: we’re no longer in the present. But how did they change David Wenham’s and Frances O’Conner’s hairstyles and not play it for laughs? (Perhaps 10 years of Friends has taken its toll on the modern viewer: you view a flashback with a different hairstyle, and expect to hear a laughing track.) It’s just another visual device. So the structure is fragmented, skipping between these narratives, and it works beautifully. Wenham and O’Conner shine, as does the actress…playing their daughter. She is so very cute, so very beautiful, that you worry she’ll fall into that painful category of cute children, and yet she escapes this trite fate too—the moments when she does seem to be over-performing you suddenly realise that this very over-performing is in character, and beautifully judged.
What is wrong with the film? Well, it is too long. There is something a bit far-fetched about the story, but it’s meant to be both far-fetched and within the realm of possibility. I think it mostly succeeds here. Strangely for a film making references to Ian Curtis and Joy Division so regularly, the sound design and scoring didn’t make much impact.
But there is so much else here to discover. I’m not an admirer of the previous Rob Conelly/David Wenham collaboration: I found The Bank to be trite, badly scripted, clunky. Here, at times I responded more to the film than to the book—a rare occurrence to me. I found reading the book, there were moments Perlman seemed to be beating his audience over the head with the message: things cannot continue as they are. It’s a powerful enough message that I think we get it simply as witnesses to the Eddie and Tanya’s life.
What works beautifully is Melbourne: for one thing, the cinematographers have made a virtue of Melbourne’s plainnesses. There’s no attempt to pretty up the city: if anything, the framing of shots is a little too centred and—dare I say it—at times a little dull. Despite this, Melbourne shines through in grey light as well as golden, in the laneways as well as the thoroughfares. Another thing that works beautifully is the clutter: for instance, in their kitchen Eddie and Tanya have not one but two mortar and pestles. One of these is stone, the other wood. Anyone who really uses their mortar and pestle will realise that a wooden one just won’t do the trick. Yet I can imagine buying or being given a wooden one before I realised its uselessness, and then putting it on a shelf just above the really useful shelves. This discussion of the kitchen utensils is simply a long-winded way of saying that looking at Eddie and Tanya’s home, I felt that I had lived there—or if not me, then one my friends. Watching the film, though 15 years younger than the characters portrayed, I recognised my life, recognised my own rebelliousness and imperiousness giving way to the bourgeois attachment to things, to comforts, the details.
A few years ago there was a great tumult about Lantana. I saw it, and enjoyed it immensely—but in that tangle of interconnectedness, I found that every so often the film stepped over some invisible line, no longer felt natural. While coming close to that line on occasion, toeing it, thinking about taking a small skip over it, I don’t think Three Dollars crosses it. And so it is that I say, at last! A film for adults.
There’s a lot of talk about what’s wrong with the Australian film industry. I would never have believed that Rob Conelly, the man behind the real turkey of a film The Bank (good fun, yes, but oh so contrived and throwaway) could then come back with such a lovely, sophisticated film. SO lovely and sophisticated that I feel reluctant to use the word sophisticated in case you think of the shallow, chardonnay sipping take on sophistication that is so often the case. And, by the way, in all the enumerations of the sins and downfalls of the Australian film industry, I would like to say that one thing we’ve got oh so right is the ever-present David Wenham. His turn here is no exception. (It has actually contributed substantially to my newfound ambition to hug Mr Wenham before I die…)
The film’s structure is a little more fragmented than that of the book of the same title on which it is based, Elliot Perlman’s zeitgeist moment of 1998. I think this works in the films favour—it is making the connections between the narratives of the periods each nine-and-a-half-years in a more organic way, skipping between these narratives with signposts such as hairstyle and soundtrack to let us know: we’re no longer in the present. But how did they change David Wenham’s and Frances O’Conner’s hairstyles and not play it for laughs? (Perhaps 10 years of Friends has taken its toll on the modern viewer: you view a flashback with a different hairstyle, and expect to hear a laughing track.) It’s just another visual device. So the structure is fragmented, skipping between these narratives, and it works beautifully. Wenham and O’Conner shine, as does the actress…playing their daughter. She is so very cute, so very beautiful, that you worry she’ll fall into that painful category of cute children, and yet she escapes this trite fate too—the moments when she does seem to be over-performing you suddenly realise that this very over-performing is in character, and beautifully judged.
What is wrong with the film? Well, it is too long. There is something a bit far-fetched about the story, but it’s meant to be both far-fetched and within the realm of possibility. I think it mostly succeeds here. Strangely for a film making references to Ian Curtis and Joy Division so regularly, the sound design and scoring didn’t make much impact.
But there is so much else here to discover. I’m not an admirer of the previous Rob Conelly/David Wenham collaboration: I found The Bank to be trite, badly scripted, clunky. Here, at times I responded more to the film than to the book—a rare occurrence to me. I found reading the book, there were moments Perlman seemed to be beating his audience over the head with the message: things cannot continue as they are. It’s a powerful enough message that I think we get it simply as witnesses to the Eddie and Tanya’s life.
What works beautifully is Melbourne: for one thing, the cinematographers have made a virtue of Melbourne’s plainnesses. There’s no attempt to pretty up the city: if anything, the framing of shots is a little too centred and—dare I say it—at times a little dull. Despite this, Melbourne shines through in grey light as well as golden, in the laneways as well as the thoroughfares. Another thing that works beautifully is the clutter: for instance, in their kitchen Eddie and Tanya have not one but two mortar and pestles. One of these is stone, the other wood. Anyone who really uses their mortar and pestle will realise that a wooden one just won’t do the trick. Yet I can imagine buying or being given a wooden one before I realised its uselessness, and then putting it on a shelf just above the really useful shelves. This discussion of the kitchen utensils is simply a long-winded way of saying that looking at Eddie and Tanya’s home, I felt that I had lived there—or if not me, then one my friends. Watching the film, though 15 years younger than the characters portrayed, I recognised my life, recognised my own rebelliousness and imperiousness giving way to the bourgeois attachment to things, to comforts, the details.
A few years ago there was a great tumult about Lantana. I saw it, and enjoyed it immensely—but in that tangle of interconnectedness, I found that every so often the film stepped over some invisible line, no longer felt natural. While coming close to that line on occasion, toeing it, thinking about taking a small skip over it, I don’t think Three Dollars crosses it. And so it is that I say, at last! A film for adults.
posted by Kate Middleton at 1:32 AM
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