Worth: $14.00
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Cast:
Radha Mitchell, Mia Wasikowska, Ilsa Fogg, Erik Thomson, Ariel Donoghue, Liz Alexander, Eric Bana, Pedrea Jackson, Clarence Ryan
Intro:
The score by Nigel Westlake is both gentle and thrilling ... beautifully shot … lacking the gut punch it needs to truly be effective – both as an environmental tale and as a mother and daughter relationship story…
The earnest sincerity of Robert Connolly’s ecological coming-of-age film Blueback is clearly well-intentioned, but eventually falls to being underwhelming in its simplistic execution.
Written by Connolly and based on Tim Winton’s YA novella (Winton provides extra writing on the screenplay), Blueback is at its heart two things; a story of a mother and daughter, and an environmental tale about how it falls upon us to protect nature.
Ably acted by its three main leads; Radha Mitchell who plays the mother, Dora, Mia Wasikowska who plays her daughter Abby as an adult, and Ilsa Fogg who plays Abby as a teenager – Blueback dips in and out of sentimental melodrama to deliver the message that we are killing the very planet that sustains us for “short term” goals.
At times, the script presumes that the audience has been living under a rock and that is to its detriment. Connolly and Winton must surely be aware that one of the greatest stresses that young people face is the effects of the human made climate crisis. The naiveté of the screenplay is achingly difficult to accept.
Nonetheless, Blueback is family fare and there are worse crimes than having an audience sit and ponder their role in environmental protection, and Connolly and cinematographers Andrew Commis and Rick Rifici (for underwater shots) give us a stunning window into the innate beauty of a world worth fighting for.
Dora and Abby live in a fictional town called Longboat Bay (Bremer Bay substitutes as its real-life location). Dora, played by Radha Mitchell in her youth, then later by Liz Alexander in her old age, is a vital and fierce presence; a community activist who comes to vivid life when the pristine area is threatened by corrupt developer, Costello (Erik Thomson). Dora and child Abby (Ariel Donoghue) spent halcyon days skin diving the ocean waters and discovering its unique eco-system. One particular inhabitant is a blue groper (puppeted by Jacob Kyriakidis), who Abby befriends and names Blueback. Abby swears to keep the groper a secret. Blueback’s existence is already known by the ethical fisherman “Mad Macka” (Eric Bana), who at first seems to have a mildly flirtatious relationship with Dora, but that storyline doesn’t go anywhere as he’s mostly an expository plot device.
Dora grows into a teenager (now played by Ilsa Fogg) and is a bright young woman for whom the ocean is a site of fascination, and a place that will eventually lead her to pursue marine biology as a career. Costello has not gone away. He illegally dredges the beach, hires goons to overfish the area and remove any sea life that could be considered a reason for creating a sanctuary.
Costello is a rote villain and Connolly and Winton deciding to put all the evil-doing on his shoulders doesn’t do the message of the film any favours. Yes, there is a weak council who Dora shouts at, and a police force that takes Dora away when she chains herself to machinery to stop the dredging, but the truth of environment devastation is more complex than one nefarious developer trying to get his hands on land to create a resort.
Dora and Abby have different methods to try to save the ocean and its creatures. For Dora, it is direct community action and protest, for Abby it is scientific study into biodiversity. When we first meet Abby, she is an adult studying the effects of mass coral bleaching. The script manufactures tension between teen Abby and Dora, with Dora not understanding why her daughter won’t stand up and fight like she does, and Abby trying to explain that her way of fighting is to be educated.
Like most Winton adaptations, there are scenes of campfires on beaches and people singing and celebrating the perfect moments that their beautiful surroundings afford.
Also like many Winton adaptations, there are indigenous characters who act as a secondary device to a mainly white cast. In the case of Blueback, that character is Briggs. As a teen (Pedrea Jackson), he is Abby’s boyfriend who tells her the story of European whalers who in the 19th Century caused so much devastation that the whales no longer inhabit the region. As an adult, Briggs (Clarence Ryan) principally acts as a cheer-squad for Abby and the quickly fading Dora. It’s frustrating that the impact of colonisation on the environment is not more directly established and is left to hang in the background.
Despite its particular failings, Blueback does have firm positives. The score by Nigel Westlake is both gentle and thrilling. The film is beautifully shot, and Connolly’s visuals often do more effective messaging than the script. It’s also a female led story (Winton’s original child character is gender-swapped) which gives particular resonance to Dora’s line that “We come from water; we belong to it,” which echoes the womb that every human passed through to enter life.
It is a bit curmudgeonly to nit-pick a film that is doing its best to be consciousness raising and a positive representation of collective action; yet Blueback is lacking the gut punch it needs to truly be effective – both as an environmental tale and as a mother and daughter relationship story. Blueback is melodramatic when it should be restrained and restrained when it should lean wholeheartedly into weightier themes. For a family film it is passable, and at times quite lovely, but one can’t help feeling that it’s all too pat and sentimental.
