Year:  2019

Director:  Gregor Jordan

Rated:  M

Release:  October 8, 2020

Distributor: Universal

Running time: 105 minutes

Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth

Cast:
Kelly Macdonald, Garrett Hedlund, David Wenham, Aaron Pedersen, Julia Stone

Intro:
Sensitive… drawn out.

Leading Australian novelist Tim Winton has two big ideas (well, three if you count recognition of Aboriginal wisdom); masculinity and God. In this sensitive adaptation by Jack Thorne, of Winton’s 2001 novel Dirt Music, both themes are present.

The central concern is troubled relationships and the film takes its time to explore these as they ebb and flow like the ocean. The sea, or rather our coastal relationship to it, is a constant backdrop and a vital aspect of both the film and the book. From the very beginning, we see the main female character Georgie (an interestingly cast, suntanned Kelly Macdonald successfully losing her Scottish burr) strip down and plunge fearlessly into it. She is a strong swimmer and, like the men in the film, she acts first and thinks second. Georgie’s sometime partner Jim (David Wenham looking suitably weathered) is a cray fisherman. He is a rough diamond but not without a steak of vulnerability. Georgie and Jim are making the best of their on and off again relationship, but we sense that they are they are drifting apart despite themselves.

When Georgie happens to meet Lu (Garrett Hedlund), he is out in a tinnie poaching Jim’s crayfish, so the characters’ lives are entwined, and we learn this is so in more ways than one. Lu is so handsome that she is immediately attracted to him. He is another strong silent type (all the men in Winton’s worlds feel strongly but can’t verbalise easily). With a ute and tousled hair and a dog, he looks like the quintessential Aussie male that could have strayed out of a beer advert. When they meet, we kind of know what is coming. Deliberately not calculating the correct course of action, they go straight to bed and decide to worry about the consequences later. Hedlund, like MacDonald, is not actually Australian, but he certainly looks the part here. It is not accidental that he’s like a character in a Western (the film is another kind of Western), seemingly driven by an existential quest to get away. Possibly for him, only complete geographic remoteness can assuage his pain.


A lot of the film is taken up with Lu trying to get there, and then with Georgie’s pursuit. In the way that director Gregor Jordan (Two Hands, Buffalo Soldiers) helms, it sometimes feels too drawn out. Perhaps this is because it is an adaptation and it proceeds at a novelist’s rather than a filmmaker’s pace. There is also, of course, the not-incidental pleasures of the immense coastal landscapes ravishingly filmed by cinematographer Sam Chiplin.

Then there is the religious angle. Winton has made no secret of his faith and the religious impulse is near the centre of his art. This too is as ancient as the sea. Art always used to be about man’s relationship to the numinous or the ineffable; it’s just that, in a largely secular age, we no longer expect or honour that. The book and the film never ram it down our throats either, but there are some things that happen near the end that are inexplicable in the rational universe. Sometimes, love too, is a miracle.

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