Dirt Music
Directed by: Gregor Jordan
Runtime: 105 minutes
It’s not often that I think a movie could be improved by a shark or two; in fact I don’t usually watch a film and have the conscious thought of ‘Yep, this requires a shark’ just to make it a little (or a lot) more interesting. Dirt Music could have used a shark or two from the very beginning saving this film from straying into the territory of boring.
On the surface, this is a book-to-film adaption that, really, should have been good. Based on the novel of the same name by Tim Winton (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), filmed on location in Western Australia, and featuring Kelly MacDonald (Brave), Garret Hedlund (Mudbound), and David Wenham (The Lord of the Rings) in the lead roles, Dirt Music should have worked.
It, to put it simply, doesn’t.
The film tells the story of Kelly Macdonald’s Georgie, an ex-nurse who’s moved to a small fishing town in northern Western Australia and with Jim Buckridge (David Wenham), a local fisherman who inspires loyalty and intimidation from the local residents. Wallowing in a lonely existence with an inattentive Jim, Georgie meets and forms an instant connection to Lu Fox (Garret Hedlund), the town outcast who fishes at night with a mysterious past connection to Jim and a yearning to escape.
The performances in this aren’t bad; in fact, the three main cast members do very well with the material they have (Hedlund and Macdonald give the Australian accent their all) and the sweeping shots of the Western Australian coast are beautiful and awe-inspiring… but that’s where it ends. The film struggles with a clear lack of narrative direction. The central conflict between the characters is almost non-existent and it is seemingly unable to figure out what story it wants to tell and who it wants to tell it. The characters are shallowly drawn and the actors face the insurmountable task of making them both likeable and interesting (David Wenham is the most successful in this), a task made harder by dialogue that’s ripped from the book and sounds unnatural spoken aloud. The environment, an omniscient, threatening character in Winton’s novels, doesn’t lend itself to the moodiness the film is trying to achieve and the atmospheric shots fall flat as the film drags on.
This all combines into a film that struggles to be interesting. The emotion it tries to invoke fails as the audience finds it hard to care—there’s a subplot that leaves Lu stranded at sea and a dog dead and even that failed to raise the expected emotion (it was at this point I thought a shark might make a fortuitous appearance). The music promised in the title only becomes important too late in the film, when the emotional impact of it is already lost and the end is less than satisfactory as the promise of a cyclone never comes to fruition.
Put simply, Dirt Music would have benefited quite a bit from the timely arrival of a Great White to break through the monotony of the melodrama.
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