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score 3/10
When this film started my early impressions of it were good; we have Kate Winslet arriving back in Australia very much playing against type as a 'bad-ass' women seeking revenge. Upon hearing her mutter the line 'I have a score to settle here' I thought Yes this is going to be a really good revenge film. I really couldn't have been more wrong....
Tonally & narratively The Dressmaker is a complete mess and it seemed obvious after about the first 20-30 minutes that the filmmakers seemed to be unsure how to actually play this film; from the outset it seems to be about Kate Winslet exacting revenge against those that have wronged her as a child - however this aspect is then ignored for large portions of the film and then starts to become a melodrama focusing on the fraught & rather strained relationship between mother and daughter. I realise that a lot of narratives will focus on different themes during their running time, but in The Dressmaker a lot of the time it's feels like you're watching a sketch-show i.e a series of unrelated incidents strung together with very little connecting these scenes together. This is OK in sketch-shows because that's the point of them, but in a film there needs to be some kind of logical flow and some sort of cohesion to connect everything together, but there is little evidence of that here. As well as purportedly being about revenge and self-discovery the film also throws in other random nonsense such as a wedding which had nothing to do with the story, one character who is a police sergeant who likes to dress up in women's clothing (which isn't particularly funny in the first place). The film also flits backwards and forwards covering the same ground which makes it also feel very repetitive - this isn't helped by the fact that the film flits backwards and forwards a lot whilst doing little to actually move anything forward!!!. The romance between Kate Winslet and Liam Hemsworth was nauseating and totally unconvincing - there was just no chemistry there at all and every time I saw the pair of them on screen together they made me cringe... Another issue with this film is that the people and the scenarios never feel believable. I mean the last time I saw that many crazy people together was when I watched One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. There are some funny moments, but sometimes the filmmakers just go overboard and mostly create scenarios that seem more surreal than real. This set-up is amusing at first, but just gets more tiresome and less and less believable the further things progress....
There were other things I didn't understand such as how come Myrtle/Tilly and her mother couldn't remember that she'd allegedly killed someone? And how come later they were able to recall the event? It's never confirmed that they've suffered amnesia or such like and we're not given any explanation for their lapses in memory or them suddenly regaining their memories.
Although it generally seems like it's pointless the film does eventually start to make its point (about 2/3 of the way into the film). It throws in various twists such as the boy killing himself as opposed to Myrtle/Tilly killing him. The deceased boy being her brother and the dead boy's father also being her father. Despite the fact that it seemed to be trying to create a 'thought-provoking' ending about moral decency it undoes itself when we learn that Myrtle/Tilly's father sent her away to get back at her mum which in turn causes Tilly to exact her revenge on all of the locals??? Even with some of the clever twists it's still a very weak film with a rather unrewarding pay-off.
Thankfully, some of the performances in this film are excellent and really help to raise this film from the doldrums; Judy Davis is brilliant as Kate Winslet's mother and rising star Sarah Snook was also very good. Hugo Weaving is normally a reliable actor but he was uncharacteristically poor here (but then look at what he had to work with). Hemsworth smiles a lot and takes off his shirt but contributes little else. Kate Winslet puts in an above average performance but she wasn't the star of the show as far as I was concerned.
The Dressmaker is roundly a poor film but it does benefit from some very good performances and Judy Davis is responsible for a lot of the comedy moments which does make the film tolerable on odd occasions.
jimbo-53-186511 19 March 2016
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3434405/ |
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21-11-2019 13:12:23