Mental

Synopsis: The Moochmores of Dophin Heads are in trouble. Barry Moochmore (Anthony LaPaglia) is standing for re-election as Mayor but his wife, Shirley (Rebecca Gibney) is having a nervous breakdown. His five daughters all think that they suffer from mental disorders. His solution? Introduce hitchhiker Shaz (Toni Collette) into the household. His troubles have only just begun.

If Muriel Heslop had married Barry Moochmore and moved to Dolphin Heads she probably would have been very much like Shirley Moochmore or in other words, just like her mother, Betty, in P.J. Hogan’s Aussie comedy classic, Muriel’s Wedding (1994). This much writer/director Hogan has got right as he takes us back to the suburban ennui and gaudily crass world of second-rate tourist watering holes and back-scratching local politics of which his hit film made such brilliant fun nearly 20 years ago.

Given that film’s success a lesser director would have simply have used it as a template.  But for all the superficial similarities Mental goes in a very different direction. Unfortunately I suspect that audiences are not going to follow, and not just because of a creatively-inert desire for more of the same. Aside from the Abba music what made the earlier film so successful was that Hogan perfectly judged the balance between bitter and sweet in his parody of the grotesqueries of the Australian vernacular. Mental on the other hand is a striking amount of bitterness coated with a thin layer of sweetness.

Yes Toni Collette is again his leading lady but she is not the incorrigibly fantasizing, ever-willing-to-please, overweight Muriel. Rather she’s a confrontational, if not downright aggressive, roughnut with a foul mouth (the crude language has earned the film an MA rating, a commercial folly, if nothing else). Equally the film is not a good-humoured display of human foibles but is rather a harshly exaggerated contrivance that tries to turn mental illness, attempted suicide and date rape into entertainment  by adopting a self-consciously outrageous manner. Unlike Muriel's Wedding or another comparable dysfunctional family comedy, Little Miss Sunshine (2006), in which Collette also starred, the attempts at humour, most of which take place in the early part of the film, try too hard and invite pity rather than laughter.

As ever Toni Collette is fabulous but Anthony LaPaglia is miscast as the Ocker husband. He’s been so long away from our shores that his affected Strine accent is ludicrous, has none of Ms Collette’s chameleon-like skills and is stilted throughout. Surely there must be someone out there to take over from Bill Hunter!! Liev Schreiber on the other hand is surprisingly good as the shark-fixated Trevor Blundell and Rebecca Gibney does a fine job as the now middle-aged Muriel surrogate, Shirley Moochmore.

Mental is a well-made film. The ideas are, as Kath and Kim would say, "different", the production design solid and Donald McAlpine's photography captures the Sunshine Coast tackiness perfectly but the film's strident tone, only relieved by a feelgood top and tail, is going to disappoint fans of Muriel’s Wedding and is unlikely to win over anyone else.

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