Dir. Rowan Woods, Australia, 2005, 114 mins
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Sam Neill, Hugo Weaving
Review by Carol Allen
As much as anything this is an opportunity to appreciate what fine actors Australia and New Zealand have produced. And it’s refreshing to see now international names such as Blanchett, Weaving and Neill going home to work on a modestly budgeted but quality home grown movie.
Blanchett plays Tracy, a 32-year-old former heroin addict, managing a video store in Cabramatta, a suburb of Sydney known as both the heroin capital of Australia and as Little Saigon because of its high Vietnamese population. Clean for four years, Tracy lives with her tough and protective mother (a very good performance by Noni Hazlehurst) and her brother Ray (Martin Henderson, currently in “Fool for Love” on the West End stage). An important father figure in her life is Lionel (Weaving), despite the fact that he was the one who first got her into drugs and is himself still using. Lurking in the background is the local drugs lord Bradley, memorably played by Neill as a cold hearted bastard, who is both Lionel’s ex lover and his source of supply, until he turns Lionel’s sad little world upside down by announcing his retirement from the drugs biz. And then comes a ghost from Tracy’s druggie past with the reappearance into her life and soon her bed of her ex lover Johnny Nguyen, who four years earlier was responsible for the accident in which Ray lost part of his leg. He returns from exile in Canada, announcing to his Vietnamese family that he’s a reformed character with a new career as a stockbroker.
It’s not exactly a bundle of laughs and you might need that character run down I’ve just given you, as it’s very difficult at first to sort out how all these different people relate to Tracy. But I was held by the story and most of all by the performances, which are uniformly good. Hugo Weaving in particular is terrific. I was also struck by young Vietnamese American actor Dustin Nguyen as Johnny, doing a convincing Aussie accent. The Vietnamese immigrant aspect of the story is particularly interesting, being a little known aspect of Australian life outside the country. These characters with their angst ridden lives also come over as very Australian in their communication failure – the endless mobile phone calls, where they never come out with what they want to say and their very un-American total inability to vocalise their feelings. Blanchett, at the centre struggling to stay off the dope and get her life in order, is mesmerising, though the frequent cutaways to scenes of Tracy as a child on the sea shore and underwater fully clothed in a swimming pool, presumably a metaphor for her struggle to swim and not sink, become irritatingly arty and unnecessary. The film also meanders somewhat, sometimes repeating itself and taking far longer than it needs to cover the ground. And while it makes lavish visual reference to family photographs of the past, it doesn’t use them in any effective way to further illuminate the characters . Not to worry though, the actors do that pretty well on their own.
