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There's a big feature in our national newspaper, "The Australian" (see Review Liftout), declaring Muriel's Wedding Australia's best all time movie. I'm with Muriel http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10766076%5E16947,00.html IT'S hard to imagine a more unlikely screen heroine than Muriel Heslop. By her own reckoning stupid, fat and useless, the 22-year-old lies, steals, then marries a man she doesn't love just to experience the transformative thrill of marching down the aisle. A loser? Perhaps. An ignominious national heroine? Indeed. Yet there is something special about Muriel. And on the 10th anniversary of the cinematic release of Muriel's Wedding, I believe it is time to acknowledge it as the greatest film this country has produced. Write in and protest if you will. After all, gaudy comedies about people with low self-esteem don't usually head the favourites' lists of critics or audiences. Yet for all its glitzy effervescence, Muriel's Wedding has always been so much more than the cleverly calibrated camp fest it may seem at first viewing. From its opening scene, in which Muriel rises above her peer-group status by catching a bridal bouquet, the film projects the bleak, unsettling, sharply satirical voice of Australian writer/director P.J. Hogan, as channelled through one of the best Australian casts we've seen on screen. Indeed, it is the movie's complexity, its frothy humour underscored by a dark social commentary on Australian suburban life, that lends it a sophisticated edge that is absent in so many serious but single-layered dramas. Yes, its characters and their wardrobes are occasionally over the top. Yet there are also shrewd touches of great restraint, such as the moment early in the movie when a depressed Muriel lies impassively on her bed, her face so devoid of expression that the scene is far more poignant and painful than a depiction of an overwrought, teary outburst. And while themes such as love, friendship, rejection and desperation have been trotted out in more earnest Australian films, such nuanced concepts have seldom been handled with the degree of insight and truthfulness exhibited in Muriel's Wedding. This is an Australian film in the best possible sense. While it eschews the self-conscious Australiana of 1980s hits such as Crocodile Dundee and Young Einstein, its characters and their utterances could only have come from this part of the world. The film's most famous line - "You're terrible, Muriel" - became quickly established as part of the country's vernacular. The film's other enduring quality is its brazen confidence, a trait all too infrequently on display in the much-maligned crop of recent Australian comedies that seem to have been designed with little in mind except targeting an imagined demographic. Muriel's Wedding dared to be a film everybody could relate to, and it worked. Ten years on, nothing has changed. "No one on that film was established, so we were just going for broke; we didn't have anything to hold back," said Toni Collette after making the movie. For that, we can be eternally grateful. *** STARRING the then virtually unknown Collette, who celebrated her 21st birthday on the set, Muriel's Wedding unfolds in the sunny but oppressively provincial town of Porpoise Spit (very much resembling the southern Gold Coast) where Muriel lives with her bullying father Bill (Bill Hunter), chronically depressed mother Betty (Jeanie Drynan), and two hapless siblings (Daniel Wyllie and Gabby Millgate). Rejected by her former schoolmates, who tell her that she has to find friends "at her own level", Muriel eventually finds friendship after meeting up with one-time acquaintance Rhonda (fellow unknown Rachel Griffiths). The pair promptly move to Sydney, where Muriel becomes fixated on getting into a bridal gown, because she sees marching down the aisle as a symbol of success. Though she reaches her goal, this turns out to be a mixed (if ultimately liberating) blessing. Muriel's Wedding had its world premiere at the Cannes film festival in May 1994, where it received a 15-minute standing ovation. It was released in Australia on September 29 that year, just a fortnight after The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. Both films were blockbusters in Australia. Priscilla's eventual haul of $16,459,245 was slightly higher than Muriel's $15,765,571. But Muriel's Wedding did better in its initial cinematic run in both the US and the UK. In London, it became the No.1 film when it was released in April 1995. Back home the film triumphed at the Australian Film Institute awards, winning in four categories including best film, with much-deserved best actress and supporting actress prizes going to Collette and Griffiths. Not everyone was mesmerised. While the film proved a hit with local critics, some British reviewers were less than effusive. "Hogan has a caricaturist's gift. But once Muriel and Rhonda decamp to Sydney, the film turns aggressively melodramatic," sniffed The Times's Geoff Brown. American critical opinion was generally more positive. The Los Angeles Times's Kenneth Turan was especially enthusiastic, calling it "a slashing guerilla attack on accepted notions of marriage, family and self-improvement that never allows us to forget the doubt that makes its characters human". The New York Times's Janet Maslin praised Hogan for making the film "much smarter than its heroine" and also for "making Muriel more cunning than she looks". Muriel's Wedding also built up a serious fan base in high places. Julia Roberts was so impressed by it that she made sure Hogan directed her next movie, 1997's mega-hit My Best Friend's Wedding. And, as everyone knows, it launched the global careers of Collette and Griffiths, both of whom have gone on to garner Academy Award nominations for subsequent performances: Collette in The Sixth Sense, Griffiths in Hilary and Jackie. Collette was also nominated for a Golden Globe for her role as Muriel. Wherever Muriel's Wedding played, comparisons with Priscilla inevitably abounded, thanks primarily to their joint deployment of ABBA songs, their mutual coarse humour and extreme colour palettes. And in many respects Muriel and Priscilla did resemble twin sisters, with that other ugly duckling tale, Strictly Ballroom, their close cousin. Yet Muriel was different. Its big comic moments are hysterically funny, especially when embracing music. Even non-ABBA fans known to this writer have willingly succumbed to Muriel and Rhonda's inspired lip-syncing to ABBA's Waterloo video clip - now easily the most commonly referenced scene from the film. Then there's the moment when Muriel walks down the aisle and traditional organ music gives way to the opening brass riffs of I Do I Do I Do I Do I Do, demonstrating that, at its heart, Muriel's Wedding is also a musical; Hogan's fears that he couldn't have made the movie without winning the rights to ABBA's back catalogue were well founded. Yet perhaps the scene that best exemplifies Muriel's unique daring is the "beanbag scene" in which Rhonda and Muriel bring three boys back to their Sydney flat, only for the carefree fun of the night to be obliterated by Rhonda's dramatic collapse. The cause of Rhonda's problem, it turns out, is cancer. While The Sixth Sense later became a global smash on the strength of its jaw-dropping twist, that chilling denouement still cannot rival the unnerving, sudden shift that takes place in Muriel's Wedding. In a single moment, the timbre of the film falls from its joyful, exuberant perch with a shuddering thud. Rhonda's plight certainly takes the sheen off the film's glossy surface, especially when Muriel turns out to be a less than steadfast friend. Rhonda, after all, was the one person who was prepared to stand up and say, "I'm with Muriel." Muriel's Wedding also has a much sadder victim in Muriel's mum, the mild-mannered Betty. Hogan might allow us to laugh at Betty when she absently heats up a cup of tea in the microwave or falls for Muriel's devious request for a blank cheque ("How much for?" is her even blanker response), but even he admits that the film's crew lobbied him to make changes to the scene in which Muriel fails to acknowledge her mum at her wedding. Little wonder that Betty's seemingly benign exterior masks the inner pain that leads to the most tragic of deaths. Incredibly, however, Muriel's Wedding carries its increasingly heavy accumulation of misery without patronising its characters or descending into mawkish sentiment. More remarkably still, it remains a comedy, albeit one that breaks rules. For, by the time the end credits roll, Muriel is no longer married; her sham wedding with a South African swim star is over. Nor is she romantically attached. Hogan went on to direct My Best Friend's Wedding - when again the heroine wound up single. Despite the instincts of the studio, who made him shoot a "happy" ending where Roberts gets her man, it was Hogan's unconventional version - in which Roberts's fiancé runs off with Cameron Diaz - that won out. Roberts was clearly emboldened by her director's previous achievements. As Hogan recalls, when she was uncertain about the wisdom of her character breaking into song in the movie's crab-house scene, she reassured herself by rewatching Muriel's Wedding. *** SO where did Muriel's Wedding come from? Its acuity of observation recalls Barry Humphries, and not just Dame Edna. One can all too readily imagine Les Patterson lapping it up when Bill boasts that his wife's suicide resulted in a condolence card from Bob Hawke. In a broader sense, Hogan, like Kath & Kim more recently, has reimagined Humphries's droll portrayals of the more stultifying aspects of Australian life in a way that is anything but celebratory. Muriel's Wedding also bears the imprint of the excellent 1991 film, Proof, on which Hogan worked as a second-unit director for his wife, director Jocelyn Moorhouse. Proof was also produced by Moorhouse and Lynda House, the same team that produced Muriel's Wedding. Starring Hugo Weaving as a blind man who takes pictures, Proof sounds farfetched but is in fact a caustic and sharply observed meditation about trust that, like Muriel's Wedding, straddles the comedy/drama divide with aplomb. In a more direct sense, however, Muriel's Wedding is an embellishment of the lived experience of its creator, though it isn't as directly autobiographical as some might believe. "I've always said Muriel was me; but in fact the story was inspired by my sister," Hogan is quoted as saying in Stephen Lowenstein's book, My First Movie. "She and my father had a very stormy relationship. "They [their parents] had got her a job selling cosmetics but she embezzled money from him, forging his signature on cheques. And when the shit hit the fan, she disappeared. She was missing for almost a year. Then finally she called me. She'd been living in Sydney for a year with a friend but was too scared to contact anyone because she'd stolen close to $15,000 and there was no way she could pay it back. I felt that was a good beginning for a story." Hogan, who had been planning to write a screenplay about a girl desperate to get married, folded that idea into the saga of his sister's plight. It is fudging it, of course, to suggest that taking a cue from "real life" makes a movie inherently truthful. But after watching Muriel's Wedding more times than I'd care to admit, its copious coincidences and plot contrivances, as ample as Muriel's lumpy frame, are dwarfed by an overwhelming sense of authenticity. And dare we end with a parallel between Muriel's Wedding and ABBA? For while both have been hugely popular, both have also been dismissed in some quarters as little more than disposable distractions. We should have known better, of course. Muriel's wish that her life be as good as a song from Sweden's fab four might have once sounded like the emptiest of ambitions. But a decade ago Hogan made a movie that has become as much a classic as Dancing Queen. And that, as we all can now appreciate, is no small achievement. The Muriel's Wedding 10th anniversary special edition DVD will be released in November. Lawrie Zion is The Australian's national film writer. Thanks to ABBAMAILer James O'Brien East Perth Western Australia |