ILL-FITTING AND UNCOMFORTABLE
Dressmaker awkwardly mixes drama with farce, creating an uneven mess
“Diary of a Mad Black Woman,” Roger Ebert wrote when Tyler Perry’s feature debut arrived to much astonishment in the winter of 2005, “begins as the drama of a wife of 18 years, dumped by her cruel husband and forced to begin a new life. Then this touching story is invaded by the Grandma from Hell, who takes a chainsaw to the plot, the mood, everything.”
The trouble was Perry, who plays the now widely known franchise-starring Grandma Madea in farcical drag, seemed a sort of clown out of water, whooping it up with fart jokes and crass one-liners in the middle of a movie that was, in essence, a drama about betrayal, infidelity and domestic abuse. Here you are watching this poor woman endure humiliation and indignity, ejected cruelly from her home on the eve of her anniversary, when suddenly Madea shows up and starts cackling and cutting things in half with a chainsaw — “a literal chainsaw,” as Ebert put it.
Madea and her tone-splitting chainsaw springs to mind often throughout The Dressmaker, a serious drama about guilt and revenge invaded by a whole battalion of Grandmas from Hell. The Dressmaker is Tilly Dunnage (Kate Winslet), cosmopolitan and chic, returning home to small-town Dungatar, in the Australian outback, after a 25-year exile — one forced upon her as punishment for the supposed murder of a classmate in elementary school, though Tilly herself has no memory of the crime at all.
Grave stuff, this, and for the most part it’s played straight: There are stylized monochrome flashbacks, flourishes of plaintive strings, pensive soliloquies about repentance and remorse. Tilly isn’t the only one in private anguish, though. This is a backwater in the early 1950s — of course it’s harbouring town-wide despair. Sorrow, trauma, repression: There’s so much misery lurking beneath the pastoral veneer, it’s like a Carson McCullers novel.
Yes, but what if The Heart is a Lonely Hunter had gags every few paragraphs?
Let’s take a representative example. Dungatar’s police ser- geant, an affable man named Farrat (Hugo Weaving), is an impassioned cross-dresser impelled by circumstance to wear only what he is supposed to. The man’s story is plainly tragic: Shackled by mores, a slave to repression, even blackmailed into wrongdoing by the threat of disgrace — and yet when he’s afforded a taste of personal freedom, a glimpse of the life he wants to live, it’s made into a joke. The movie treats Weaving’s dotings over luxury fabrics as though it were the most amusing thing imaginable.
Oh, but that’s nothing compared to the treatment of the town villain. It’s revealed early on that this thuggish man (Shane Bourne) nightly drugs his ailing wife and, once she’s asleep, rapes her. The revelation is shot and staged as a punchline.
More often, the intrusions of the comic on the dramatic aren’t so much offensive as merely strange, which nevertheless torpedoes any hope of the audience taking this seriously. The Dungatar townspeople are, with few exceptions, patently absurd, nearly one and all the kind of bumbling, dim-witted caricatures who populate prime time sitcoms.
They’re defined not by motivation or desire or psychological shading, but by quirky tics or character defects or (in at least one case) silly walks. And still they harbour sin and misery!
The town physician, he of the silly walk, is a serial wife abuser and overall wretch. But how can anybody hate, or feel anything whatsoever about, an enfeebled cartoon baddie who skulks around like Mr. Magoo?
The same goes for the cast at large. This is meant to be the story of Tilly’s vindication and
vengeance against the people who wronged her. But what satisfaction is there in seeing someone emerge victorious when the battle seems so ludicrously fake?