“Dirt Music” is a movie with longing, the small town entanglements and even a poster that stirred up a frightening epiphany. Is Australia’s most lauded modern author Tim Winton – whose novel the film is based on – just a mellifluous, meditative, prestige Nicholas Sparks? The answer is yes, which makes “Dirt Music” – a tale of shared guilt, isolation and dead-end detours – a conflicting viewing experience.
Georgie (Kelly McDonald) is living a replacement life. She is a convenient rebound for a wealthy widower Jim (David Wenham) with an established family that holds a community standing as generational fisherman in a coastal West Australian town. By chance, a late night swim due to insomnia results in an encounter with Lu Fox (Garrett Hedlund), an alluring outsider.
Like an exhilarating, electric jolt of a cold ocean dip – Georgie awakens from the hypnotic routine and abandons any notion of life without Lu. There have been many other international actors attempting to tread the treacherous waters of the Australian accent. For Macdonald, melding her natural Scottish with Australian English dialect feels entirely right for the character. Hedlund’s Lu is largely laconic though it’s a clever misdirection amidst a substantial amount of screen time he spends shirtless conveying the way he feels.
The extraordinarily talented and welcome presence of Gregor Jordan (“Two Hands,” “Ned Kelly”) is in a death roll with this adaptation. As a purely aesthetic experience, it’s gorgeous. The rugged West Australian coastline is a sight for isolation sore eyes. Taking cues for one of the greatest films ever made – “Jaws” – the opening scenes of “Dirt Music” begins with Macdonald stripping off for a swim and her form casting a sensual silhouette in the beaming cold aquarium light.
Working with screenwriter Jack Thorne, Jordan and his players must navigate the melodrama of Georgie’s malaise and discontent. The passive and compliant abandonment of her aspirations, goals and the experiences she looked forward to in her life was erased like a sandcastle at high tide. Jim’s family and her role in it – is a kind of gap year(s) – a holiday from ever having to experience her own life. It’s a hard character to connect with because despite the emotional turmoil, she’s living in a sponsored paradise. When her mother tragically dies, it only goes further to underscore her disconnection with the world. When she’s expected to participate in cordial funeral proceedings, she rejects the notion and causes a scene.
Lu is in a state of melancholia, the surviving member of a family killed in a tragic car accident. In a series of flashbacks, you see his family (played by George Mason, musician Julia Stone and Ava Caryofyllis). His despondency resonates until the Sparks-ian perfection of the man is fully realised. The man is gorgeous, sun-kissed, a sultry musician, and a closeted intellectual – Puh-lease. This guy was designed at a hens night during the pre-show drinks of a “Wild Boys Afloat” cruise.
The snapshot of the ruddy seaside community reflects Australia’s wealth gap – palatial coastline homes are built with old money. Aaron Pedersen (the essential cop on T.V in 2020) pops up as boating mechanic Beaver. In three scenes, he’s bearing the brunt of giving social and cultural dimensions to the town.
He identifies Georgie as an outsider, he reinforces the status quo exclusion of indigenous people in the community, and he showcases his relationship with a Chinese migrant woman – giving Georgie permission to find love with a fellow outsider. The double-edged sword is that Pedersen’s realness heightens the nonsense struggles of the characters that surround him.
There’s a pivot point in the movie that feels like Jordan’s voice flexing through the material. The rote certainty of these soul mates finding each other is interrupted by a compulsion to escape. After some collisions, confessions and bombshell revelations – none of which I’ll spoil – Lu takes a journey into the archipelago wilderness. This traffic jam of unexpected eventualities caused me to exclaim “now we’re getting somewhere.”
Jordan has always struck me as a profoundly spiritual filmmaker. Jordan is also a filmmaker plugged into Australian colonial past and the history of the first nations squashed into the subterranean. He processes this guilt and spirituality by unlocking a ghostly realm for his characters.
Lu like Jimmy (Heath Ledger) in “Two Hands” is a man guided and haunted by the ghosts of family past. Lu’s home acts as an antenna, the ghostly echo of his niece Bird (Caryofyllis) and the time machine quality of the family’s music (beautifully produced and performed by Angus and Julia Stone) is an emotional and psychological torture. Lu’s tragic fatalism drives him from the familiar to the roaring and unpredictable tidal fluctuations throughout the endless chain-linked islands in Australia’s far North West – a place from Georgie’s past – leaving her the lone chance to be a life-preserver.
“Dirt Music” is a film that begs to explore race, environmental impacts of working-class pursuits, and the law’s reflex to “look the other way” to influential local power brokers. Unfortunately the tired melodramatic romance at the core has the loudest voice.
