By Erin Free
The overbearing stage mother is a true staple of popular culture, as ever present and consistently fascinating as the lovestruck teen or the hard bitten cop. One of the finest screen embodiments of this cringe-worthy archetype is the roaringly funny Justine Morgan in director, Darren Ashton’s 2007 mockumentary Razzle Dazzle, which tracks the contestants, parents, and teachers involved with a children’s dance pageant. While some parents offer mild encouragement from the sidelines, Justine barges right in, giving her daughter explicit instructions and even joining her on stage. She’s absolutely desperate for her daughter to succeed, and will stop at nothing to make it happen. She even offers that her dance-crazy daughter will target American Idol next. “And if she has to go black for that, if she has to black up, she will,” Justine says with straight faced intensity.
As performed by the brilliant Kerry Armstrong (a fine, wholly underrated actress who has delivered striking turns in everything from the TV series Prisoner and SeaChange through to films like Lantana, Oyster Farmer, and this week’s Pawno), Justine is an unforgettable creation, a voluble mix of sass, sex appeal and deranged ambition. With her skimpy outfits and steely brand of self-determination, Justine is the unshakeable master eagerly tugging at her daughter/puppet’s strings. Armstrong makes her as fascinating as she does monstrous. “A lot of people think it’s easier to do a character like this than a more obviously ‘dramatic’ one,” the actress told FilmInk upon the film’s release. “Wrong. This is one of the most difficult characters to give a structure and belief to. You just can’t make a parody of her and use her for your comedic riffs. You can’t bring in selfishness and greed as an actor.”
The true genius of Armstrong’s performance – and of screenwriters, Robin Ince and Carolyn Wilson’s creation of the character – is that they know when to stop. Justine never becomes an absurdist, pantomime villain, but rather remains horrifyingly recognisable, the type of woman you could see on the sidelines at a children’s soccer match or front and centre at a school song recital. The character of Justine Morgan is pitched at a high, theatrical level (and reels in the laughs with a string of self-absorbed one-liners), but is never allowed to depart completely from the realms of reality. She represents a high water mark for director Darren Ashton and actress Kerry Armstrong, who worked hard on both the internals and externals of the character until she felt truly real. “Please don’t think that what you saw on screen was an accident,” the actress whispered to FilmInk. “Justine was mapped out to within an inch of her life.”
