Review of Lucky Country (2009) by Gerard E — 12 Sep 2009

Unfortunately for Lucky Country, screenwriter Andy Cox is no Nick Cave. Where The Proposition ? the celebrated songsmith/sometime script-scribbler?s characteristically savage meditation on the harsh lives led by harsh men in the pre-Federation Australian outback ? was propelled by a narrative of Old Testament grandeur and as lean as its wiry author, the meandering, similarly-concerned Lucky Country falls too short, too often to leave lovers of unrelenting psychological drama crying ?Eureka!?.

Following his gutsy, real-time Dogme drama Boxing Day, director Kriv Stenders again relies heavily on handheld camera techniques to plunge audiences into the turn-of-last-century Australian bush. God-fearing widower Nat (Aden Young) and his two children, 12-year-old Tom (Toby Wallace) and on-womanhood?s-brink Sarah (Hanna Mangan-Lawrence) find their lonely existence interrupted when a trio of former Boer War soldiers arrive at their isolated cabin in ask of an evening?s respite. Never one to turn away a traveller in need (?They may be angels in disguise??), Nat invites the grizzled Henry (Pip Miller), taciturn Carver (Neil Pigot) and ailing young Jimmy (Eamon Farren) into the family home for a brief convalescence.

It might be the final mistake of his life.

What should have developed as a claustrophobic bout of mind-games between father and interlopers for the allegiance of the impressionable Tom takes a mid-point side-step from which it never regains footing when it?s revealed one of the ?guests? struck it lucky during their stint in the gold fields ? a fact he?s kept hidden from his surrogate kin. An hour in and it feels like we?re back to page one: motivations shift to give way to a sense of jarring unpredictability, which, though admirable, fails to reconcile with the more muted menace of what?s come before. A long-winded third act further fans the flames of dissatisfaction by shifting the action from the farmstead in a nebulous bid to wax philosophical over the hellishness of the land and settler?s greed before re-routing again for a climax that?s more fulfilling in theory than as it unfolds onscreen. Pigot succeeds in upholding an intensely sinister presence, making very real the underlying threat of murder and/or rape, but, by and large, performances ? like the script ? are disappointingly uneven, with Young the worst offender, delivering his tin-eared dialogue with the unconvincing gusto of a nine-year-old over-annunciating phonetically-memorised Shakespeare.

By scattering their focus, Stenders and Cox short-sell the film?s exciting prospect for a tense and period-set, cabin-in-the-woods nail-biter, which could have served a welcome dollop of quality genre to the side of this year?s bumper crop of worthy local produce. Instead, we?re left with another drab attempt to look behind the curtain of biscuit-tin Australiana, and in a year that?s brought Samson & Delilah, Balibo and the re-issued Wake in Fright, Lucky Country brings too little to the field to stake its claim.