by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $14.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Luke Bracey, Bryan Brown, Susie Porter
Intro:
… a cozy comedy-drama that can feel rather distracted by its own pathfinding at times, but the performances and Bruce Beresford’s continuing mission to bring people together on both sides of the screen still makes the journey feel like it’s worth taking.
Bruce Beresford’s lengthy career has had him bouncing back and forth between Aussie and American productions, full of stories about outsiders experiencing the ways of others and gaining enlightenment in the process, whether those cultures are across national lines or even intergenerational, like his work on the all-time classic coming-of-age yarn Puberty Blues.
With his latest, The Travellers, it’s clear that he’s working from a more personal place, with a script devised during the COVID lockdowns and a story that should sound familiar to older audiences: Making a trip back home when one or even both of your parents are in ill health.
With Luke Bracey’s Stephen as the central character, Beresford’s want to intermix cultures for the betterment of all comes through with this admittedly-poncy stage designer for European operas engaging with rural Western Australia (and a particularly beautiful pocket of it at that). While the plot developments surrounding him can be a bit of an eyeroll, with his various romantic liaisons occasionally dipping into vicarious fantasy territory, Bracey’s on-screen charm keeps it grounded enough for the purposes of the story.
Said story, as the title implies, is all about the deeper implications of the adage that “travel broadens the mind”. It’s a trait both Stephen and his father Fred (Bryan Brown) share to a certain extent, with Stephen pulled across continents for his work, while Fred, a former travelling wine merchant, spending most of his time sitting at home amongst his ramshackle skyline of empty beer bottles and piled newspapers. Again, the COVID-era creation comes through strongly, and invokes cerebral sensations in the process; the man who can’t settle down returns to the man who refuses to shift.
Buoyed by a decent sense of humour, held up primarily by Brown’s down-to-earth delivery of his own stubbornness and the occasional dad joke, the film’s thematic reach in exploring family dynamics, surface-level judgments of others, aged care, and of course, learning from outside one’s own sphere, can feel quite wayward at times. There are solid ideas presented, and it achieves a good balance between acknowledging experiential learning in the elsewhere and the importance of the homeland, but between the many discussions it starts and then ends up leaving behind, it can often feel like the script is on its own rambling journey without a clear destination. Even its actual destination, with an admittedly-beautiful showing of art reaching across all barriers and touching every heart (with Beresford putting his experience with opera to work), still struggles to make a cohesive path from what led up to it.
The Travellers is a cozy comedy-drama that can feel rather distracted by its own pathfinding at times, but the performances and Bruce Beresford’s continuing mission to bring people together on both sides of the screen still makes the journey feel like it’s worth taking. It’s not likely to set the world on fire, but its warmth is welcome nonetheless.
