Dirt Music

As I have not read Tim Winton’s novel 'Dirt Music', I can only presume that it is much better than Gregor Jordan’s rather glib screen adaptation which stretches a self-consciously Antipodean story over the generic narrative framework of a Gothic romance. The result is a film that one might well disparagingly classify as a “chick flick” (see the film's poster) and one to which the small screen would have been kinder.

Kelly Macdonald plays Georgie, a woman living in an unfulfilling relationship with Jim (David Wenham), a blokey lobsterman  who largely ignores her for his boat and blue-collar mates. She falls in love with an enigmatic loner, Lu Fox (Garrett Hedlund) who is haunted by a tragic accident from the immediate past.

The director and his writer Jack Thorne waste no time in setting the tone by having a skinny-dipping Georgie, who is the main character, encountering the tousled haired, fashionably bearded former muso, Lu while he is poaching lobsters. Soon after they’re at it like dogs and Georgie is as smitten as a Barbara Cartland heroine with her catch. Lu of course is haunted by a tragedy which you don’t need to be Hercule Poirot to guess will be a fatal car accident, so he heads to some remote archipelago for no evident purpose and in a reverse fairy-tale ending Georgie must save him from his doleurs.

Despite Winton's reputation as an authentically Australian story-teller (the film is set in Winton’s home state of Western Australia) Jordan makes virtually no effort in this respect other than throwing a few lobsters around in a suspiciously clean boat. But then, Jim lives with Georgie and his two kids (his wife has died) in a trendy-looking beach house and to the township’s doting delight can haul in $70-80,000 in a single catch so he’s no by-the-book old man of the sea. Why, other than alpha male combativeness he would be concerned with Lu catching a few lobsters for himself is not apparent. Nor for that matter is the reason the townsfolk cold-shoulder Georgie, a former nurse, other than this contributes to the narrative’s progress  by psychically uniting her and Lu as “outsiders”, a theme which permeates the film.

If Macdonald and Wenham are professionally effective in their roles there are evident problems with Hedlund (through no fault of his own) who has been given a Hemsworth makeover to fulfil the requirements for, as Kath Day Knight would put it, a “hunk of spunk” (in one squirm-inducing scene the besotted Georgie has him posing shirtless to take a photo of him on her Iphone). In another unfortunate post-coital moment Lu tells Georgie that: “music will undo you. It makes you forget, takes you somewhere else”. Whether Thorne wrote this line or it was lifted from Winton’s text it should have been removed on the grounds of egregioius pretension. Then again so should the row of Penguin Classics on Lu’s bookshelf which are too obvious signifiers of his intellectual bona fides compared to Jim’s oafishly unlettered ways.  

On the upside Sam Chiplin’s seductive landscape cinematography should provide an unpaid fillip to W.A.’s tourism industry and the use of live music which at least speaks to the title of what is often a tonally lugubrious film. More than that there is not a lot to be had from it.

FYI: For other Winton adaptations see Breath (2018), The Turning (2013)  and In The Winter Dark  (1998).

 

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