Ill-fitting mix of drama and farce falls flat

THE DRESSMAKER ★ 1/2 out of 5 Starring: Kate Winslet, Hugo Weaving, Liam Hemsworth, Judy Davis Director: Jocelyn Moorhouse Duration: 118 minutes

“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 that 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, 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 smalltown Dungatar, on the Australian outback, after a 25-year exile — one forced upon her as punishment for the supposed murder of a classmate in elementary school.

Grave stuff, this, and for the most part it’s played straight. 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.

Let’s take a representative example. Dungatar’s police sergeant, an affable man named Farrat (Hugo Weaving), is an impassioned cross-dresser impelled by circumstance to wear only what’s he supposed to. The man’s story is plainly tragic, 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. 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 very seriously.

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?