Quirky Kate will have you in stitches
Kate Winslet is stunning as a dressmaker bent on revenge in this black comedy
The Dressmaker (12A) Verdict: Odd but fun ★★★✩✩
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2 (12A) Verdict: Rousing last hurrah ★★★✩✩
AN ENIGMATIC outsider rides into a remote one-street town, seeking vengeance. It sounds like a John Ford Western, starring John Wayne or gary cooper. But Western cliches are merrily subverted in The Dressmaker. After all, this outsider is not on horseback, but on a bus, and played not by a square-jawed gunslinger type, but by Kate Winslet. We’re not in the American West, either, but the fictional Australian town of Dungatar, in 1951.
Winslet is Tilly Dunnage, who grew up in Dungatar, but as a child was forced to leave after being found guilty, if only by public opinion, of committing a murder.
She later became a successful couturier, working in London, Milan and Paris. But now she is back in the boondocks, for a reunion with her nutty, cantankerous mother, known to all as Mad Molly (brilliantly played by Judy Davis), and a showdown with the townsfolk who drove her away, and led her to think herself cursed.
Her weapon against the gossipy, scheming women of Dungatar comes in the form of swathes of silk and satin, which she first uses to dress herself, fabulously, stealing the gaze of every man during an important Aussie Rules football game. But then she starts dressing the women, too, gussying them up beyond their wildest dreams until she becomes indispensable to them.
That’s her cue for revenge, against them and their equally unlovable menfolk, who collectively represent the dung in Dungatar.
Written and directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse, and adapted from a novel by Rosalie Ham, The Dressmaker won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. For quite a while I wasn’t sure if it was mine. Moorhouse’s style of direction belongs firmly to the Wes Anderson
school of quirkiness, but where Anderson makes it seem effortless, she sometimes appears to be trying too hard.
Dungatar, with its resident hunchback, snob, simpleton and hunk (the last of these played by Liam Hemsworth), is too affectedly weird, rather like The League of Gentlemen’s Royston Vasey, but with possums.
Like Royston Vasey, Dungatar even has a resident transvestite, in this case the local police sergeant (engagingly played by Hugo Weaving), who rejoices in the bows and frills that Tilly brings to the otherwise dreary town.
How much you like the film depends on whether you buy into all this. Certainly, The Dressmaker asks a lot of its audience, not least in the way it keeps changing tempo, from knockabout black comedy to twisted revenge thriller to romance to tragedy and back again.
But it is never less than sumptuous to look at. Moorhouse and her veteran cinematographer Don McAlpine (who was Oscar-nominated for 2001’s Moulin Rouge) have made a visually stunning film, exploiting those strange, wide-open, almost Dali-esque vistas that Australia offers.
Moreover, Winslet and Davis are both so good, bringing genuine poignancy to the evolving motherdaughter relationship, that I found myself sucked into their strange world, even if it’s a bit much to expect us to believe in the love affair between Tilly and Teddy, Hemsworth’s character, who is not only Dungatar’s most muscular chap but also its most decent.
They are meant to be childhood contemporaries who, reintroduced as adults, fall for each other. For the record, though, Winslet is 40, Hemsworth only 25.
He’s back again as Gale Hawthorne in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2, in which another 25-year-old, Jennifer Lawrence, is still getting away with playing teenager Katniss Everdeen, albeit for the last time.
It has been quite a ride, with more than $2 billion taken at the global box office in just three years, and Lawrence firmly established as the world’s highest-paid actress.
Whether anyone actually deserves to have banked £34 million in the past 12 months, as she reportedly has, is a moot question. But certainly she is again wonderful in this role, radiating both strength and vulnerability as the so-called Mockingjay, standardbearer of the resistance against fiendish President Snow (Donald Sutherland), merciless ruler of the post-apocalyptic, totalitarian state of Panem. A futuristic Joan of Arc she may be, but unlike Saint Joan, Katniss is not driven by religious virtuosity. Doubt and emotional conflict threaten to overwhelm her. It’s a very fine performance from Lawrence.
But is it a commensurately fine film? With a more realistic classification, I would be more generous with my appraisal, but as a 12A it should be treated with great caution.
There is one scene in particular, when Katniss and her posse are attacked in the tunnels under Snow’s Capitol by terrifying, snarling mutants, that impressionable children really should not see.
Also, while it is hardly the filmmakers’ fault, there is another episode in which crowds of innocent people outside Snow’s palace are bombed and sprayed with bullets that is disturbingly close to the knuckle after last week’s events in Paris.
Is our dysfunctional world to blame, or just the cinema, for the fact that violent big-screen escapism looks ever more real?
Still, as an adaptation of the last of Suzanne Collins’s trilogy of novels, the film can’t be faulted. Katniss is back with her most trusted friends, including one old flame in Gale, and another she doesn’t know whether she can trust: Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), who has been brainwashed by the enemy.
NOR is she sure whether she can count on the rebel leader Alma Coin (Julianne Moore). Could she be a despot-in-waiting, once Snow has been toppled? For the Hunger Games faithful, there are huge pleasures in all this. Director Francis Lawrence (no relation) once again builds the dystopian parallel universe with great skill, and is supported by some marvellous acting (including, movingly, one last burst from the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, as propagandist Plutarch Heavensbee).
It’s all so dark and portentous that a final stab at happyish-ever-after sentimentality looks a bit halfhearted, but Collins can continue to rake in her share of the colossal profits, content that her books have been done full and enduring justice.