By James Bowman on 7.16.07 @ 12:02AM
Brenda Blethyn needs no introduction, in this excellent Australian production.
In its native Australia, Cherie Nowlan's Introducing the
Dwights was called Clubland, and you can see how that
title could have been confusing to an American -- or to a British
-- audience. The clubs of Sydney, where the film is set, feature
magicians, ventriloquists, even a guy who imitates bird-songs. In
short, they are leftovers from 1950s-vintage British music hall --
or, as we would say, vaudeville -- magically preserved in
present-day Australia. Brenda Blethyn plays Jeanie Dwight, a
now-aging British-born comedienne specializing in the sort of
double entendre humor that used to be thought of as
"naughty" on the halls but has long since given way in the rest of
the world to something much more raunchy -- and much less
innocent.
Somehow she's managed to hang on through all the changes in
comedic fashion of the last 30 or 40 years -- to hang on, but not
to make a living at it. Yet she continues to live in hope. Now, she
says, "I'm going to become a gay icon." But when she gets what she
sees as her big break, an audition with Australian television
executives, they see her humor as "too phallocentric." In her less
optimistic moments, Jeanie clings to whatever cold comfort she can
derive from the fancy that she had been headed for super-stardom
until, as she tells her two sons, "you boys arrived and brought a
luminous career to a grinding halt. Not that I'm bitter."
Her sons are Tim (Khan Chittenden) and Mark (Richard Wilson).
Tim is trying to make a go of it as a free-lance mover with his own
truck, for which mum has co-signed and in which he takes her to her
evening gigs. She takes the bus to her day job as a short order
cook in a diner. Mark is mentally handicapped and spends a lot of
his time home alone, locking himself in the bathroom, according to
mum's instructions, if anyone comes to the door. The boys' father,
John (Frankie J. Holden), once had a hit single for three weeks in
the 1970s. Now, divorced from their mother, he's working as a
security guard in a supermarket and self-producing a CD of his
covers of Conway Twitty's greatest hits.
The plot is set in motion as Tim, though he is painfully shy and
inexperienced, falls in love with Jill (Emma Booth). When, after a
number of false starts, they are able to consummate their
relationship, he feels the need to make a clean breast to her and
confess his shameful secret: "Jill, you know my mum, and my dad as
well, they're -- entertainers." We can only imagine what
connotations of failure, bitterness and embarrassment that word
must carry for him, who has lived all his life in the shadows of
his parents' ambitions and the heavy disappointments they've given
rise to. Clearly, he has no such ambitions himself, though he is a
good sport about theirs, even when his mother pulls him out of the
audience one night in front of Jill and puts women's clothes and
makeup on him.
All depends on Tim's sweetness of nature and almost virginal
innocence. They are the delight and the despair of poor Jill, as
they are also what provide a hold for his mother to keep her grip
on him. Mark, too, has to cling to Tim because he knows what a
slender emotional support his parents can provide. "Did you have a
nice evening?" Jeanie asks one night when Tim returns home from a
less than successful sexual encounter with Jill.
"No," he replies.
"Good!" she says.
She manages to keep one emotional step ahead of her own failures
by continually reminding the boys' of theirs. "I hope this isn't
going to be the Samantha story all over again," she says to Tim,
reminding him of a previous girlfriend -- by whose name she slyly
addresses Jill on their first meeting. There's also "the Kentucky
Fried Chicken episode" or "the Sea World episode" that she hopes
not to have "all over again." We never learn what any of these
"episodes" were, apart from reminders of past failures and
talismans against the failures of the future.
The worst of these, so far as Jeanie is concerned, is losing
Tim, as she sees it, to this slim, pretty young girl. For her it is
like losing another luminous career, and she fights to take him
away from her with emotional intimidation and blackmail. But Jill
is no pushover either, and it is her performance as much as that of
the monster-mum that makes this picture so successful. True, the
peripeteia in which mum changes, literally, overnight is
accounted for in only the most perfunctory fashion, but I was too
charmed by the rest of the movie to get unduly indignant about
that. This is a coming-of-age and breaking-away movie of a
peculiarly Australian kind. It's also a study in failure and
self-deception, but a joyous and a touching one. Don't miss it.
topics:
Television
