Australian import ill-fitting

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This article was published 07/10/2016 (3329 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This unclassifiable Aussie import is a revenge story. It’s also a makeover movie and a mother-daughter drama, a small-town tragedy and a screwball comedy, a Down Under western, a weeper and a Liam-Hemsworth-takes-his-shirt-off flick.

In short, The Dressmaker is all over the place, which makes it entertaining in its own wacky way — when it’s not being infuriating or exhausting.

The music in the opening scene suggests a gunslinger coming to town. Instead of a horse, Tilly Dunnage (Oscar winner Kate Winslet) is riding a bus, and instead of a six-shooter she’s armed with a Singer sewing machine.

It’s the Australian outback in the 1950s, and the glamorous Tilly has returned to the backwater home she left when she was just a girl. She is going to use the power of dressmaking to sort some things out.

Director Jocelyn Moorhouse (Proof, A Thousand Acres) co-scripts with P.J. Hogan (Muriel’s Wedding), based on the fierce and fantastical novel by Rosalie Ham. While Moorhouse pulls off some quirky comic sequences, she can’t quite corral the story’s expanding slate of characters and tearaway themes.

Tilly is back in the town of Dungatar because she needs to know whether she committed a murder many years ago. She has no clear memory of the event, but in its aftermath she was packed off to Melbourne. Tilly went on to leave Australia and work in French fashion houses, but her mother, Molly (Judy Davis), already ostracized for being unmarried, has become a bitter, impoverished, alcoholic recluse in their small community.

Tilly tries to make some kind of peace with her crotchety mother. She takes on Dungatar’s grown-up mean girls, with their social snobbery and vicious gossip. She goes after the town’s small-minded, misogynist authority figures, including a vengeful, sin-obsessed pharmacist and a lying, philandering mayor.

She’s aided by the town’s policeman (Hugo Weaving, a.k.a. the only good thing in the last two Matrix movies), who happens to be a secret cross-dresser, and by Teddy, a social outsider tolerated in town because he’s a star football player (Australian rules, of course).

The strong cast is game for anything as the story careens around. Winslet is a refreshingly earthy sort of femme fatale, and Davis brings a peppery sharpness to the role of the drunken “Mad Molly.” Hemsworth, looking relieved to be using his native Australian accent, hands in a nice, relaxed performance.

Moorhouse combines frank feminism, a touch of magic realism, a strain of Australian Gothic and some eccentric humour, particularly of the sartorial kind. We watch women in fabulous form-fitting Dior-style frocks and stiletto heels doing their errands in the dusty, red-dirt streets of this one-horse town.

In the final third, however, the film hits some starkly realistic sadness. Not even the force of Winslet’s will can hold this tonal mess together, as the crackpot comedy turns tired and sour.

Maybe the mean-mindedness of the townspeople is contagious. At some point it seems to spread to the filmmakers.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca