Charlie And Boots

Synopsis: When his wife suddenly dies, dairy farmer Charlie (Paul Hogan) withdraws from the world. His estranged elder son Boots (Shane Jacobson) decides that a fishing trip to Cape York is just the thing he and Charlie need to put the past behind them.

If movies were aligned with culinary fare, Charlie And Boots would be the equivalent of the pub meal – unremarkable but dependable value for the working-man’s dollar. And in this instance, surprisingly good value.

Writer-director Murphy, who combined Paul Hogan with Michael Caton for Strange Bedfellows in 2003 is a film-maker with a fondness for the blue-collar Australian vernacular. In this riff on his style he teams Hoges with Kenny star, Shane Jacobson for what is part road movie, part travelogue as father and son drive up the east coast of Australia in their Kingswood. It is a risky gambit precisely because it is such an obviously commercially-motivated pairing but Murphy brings it off by keeping the tone genial, the sentimentality reined in and coming up with enough dramatic substance to make the father-son relationship genuinely interesting. It is a pity that he didn't leave the expletives out as otherwise this would have made a decent family movie.  Hoges, who is now 70,  seems to have lost much of his “she’ll be right” bravado and looks like he’s resorted to cosmetic surgery to fight off the advancing years, takes quite a while to warm up but his subdued performance as the grieving husband is nevertheless engaging. Jacobson really carries the show as Boots, the hapless, good-hearted son who, as we find out, has own burdens to shoulder, and it is he rather than Hogan who supplies the comedy.

Murphy does not restrain himself when it comes to portraying classic vanilla-sliced Australian country life - there’s not a global franchise or non-Anglo-Celtic face to be seen although it seems that at least in its entertainment preferences rural Australian has been pretty much converted to mid-West American cowboy culture.  It may be a rather romanticized depiction but it works well and seeing this you’d have to be a serious stick-in-the-mud not to feel the urge to throw a bag in the boot of your car and hit the road yourself. I would however suggest that if you make it to Cape York that you be better equipped than Charlie and Boots. Exactly how they intended to camp out, even for a few days, without tent, supplies or utensils is a mystery

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