The Cup

Synopsis: The story of Damien Oliver (Stephen Curry), the jockey who rode Media Puzzle to a win in the 2002 Melbourne Cup only days after his brother Jason (Daniel MacPherson) died in a race fall.

The Cup is a film that you’ll go into wanting to like but no amount of good-will can disguise the disappointment you'll leave with. At its heart are fabulous ingredients  - Australia’s premier horse-racing event and a true story of  a racing family dogged by tragedy -  elements that give the material so much more meaning than just an annual flutter for the nation  - but director Simon Wincer, with the help of Bruce Rowland’s smothering score, pounds this into a formulaically sentimental exercise which pushes all the buttons but without turning on the mains power. In this respect it is similar to the disastrous A Heartbeat Away from earlier this year, although it is nowhere the jaw-dropping waste of time that that film was. At least, The Cup has a story with substance. But that, and a winning performance from Stephen Curry, is about all it has.

Wincer is very much a commercial director who has worked a lot in television and whose heyday as a feature film director was the 1980s (he directed The Lighthorsemen in 1986, Phar Lap in 1983 and was executive producer on The Man From Snowy River in 1982). This might make him a long-odds starter but what nobbles him, artistically at least, is his unwavering commitment to tired directorial devices. For the first section of the film, given over to setting up the main narrative ingredients, the strategy is relatively bearable but once Damien’s brother is killed, the whip comes out and Wincer works the tragedy for all it’s worth, even cross-fertilizing the Oliver family’s grief with the contemporaneous Bali bombings, in order to wring every piteous tear out of his audience. But it doesn’t work because it’s all too obviously manipulative.

The dialogue, by Wincer with novice Eric O'Keefe, is a heavy-handed affair that, for example, has at various times Damien soliloquizing his brother in a coma or his mother (Colleen Hewitt) doing likewise to God just in case we are thick enough not to be able to intuit their banal thoughts. Failing to ring true, the result is that when it comes time for Damien to decide whether to race again or quit for ever, although obviously not the authors’ intent, those around him, particularly his wife (Jodi Gordon) and manager (Martin Sacks) actually appear to be driven by self-interest rather than genuine concern for his well-being.  

A key fault with the script is that Wincer and O'Keefe focus on events at the expense of characterization. This is not helped by the acting, much of which would be fine on Neighbours but is awful when blown up to cinema proportions. Although not one of the guilty parties in this respect and perhaps because of his tongue-in-cheek role in the currently screening black comedy, The Guard, I could never get a handle on Brendan Gleeson’s Irish trainer, Dermot Weld, and kept expecting him to drop his nice guy persona and emerge as a ruthless win-at-all-costs tyrant. But remarkably, he never does. But that is pretty much the problem with all the characters – they’re all simply too bland to have any effect. 

Bye-the-bye, it is rather surprising that, particularly for a director with so much experience with horses, that the elegant creatures get only token screen time. Even more disappointing, the filming of the actual races are unremarkable (although, ironically, Jason's fall is brilliantly handled). Money spent on this rather than padding out the story with postcard recreations of Dubai and Ireland would have been a good thing. Indeed, one might well ask why any money was spent on the Arabic connection at all as it has zero dramatic effect. Ditto for (in his final film appearance) Bill Hunter’s Bart Cummings and a wedged-in cameo from The Coodabeens. But this is symptomatic of Wincer’s more-is-more sensibility. All he does however is bury the real heart of his story in a hodge-podge of (supposedly) crowd-pandering cues.

Wincer’s film is going to present problems for reviewers, particularly in the popular press, who won’t want to appear un-Australian by dismissing it (what’s not like a film with Eddie McGuire in it!!), but not to do so is like denying the elephant in the room. The Cup is a great Australian story, but as a film, Australian or otherwise, it’s a pie without sauce. Quiche, anyone?

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