Death in Brunswick

Some days it just doesn't pay to clean up your life and grow up. The day Carl Fitzgerald finally stumbles out of his trashed-out Melbourne shack and tries to order his hapless, fortyish existence by taking a job as a cook in a sleazy rock & roll club, he runs afoul of the club's brutish bouncer, gets romantically hung up on a 19-year-old bartender who happens to be betrothed to the club's oily owner, accidentally kills his Turkish kitchen assistant, has to hide the body in a cemetery, is nearly nailed by a Molotov cocktail, gets roughed up by both the bouncer and the revenge-minded friends of the deceased kitchen assistant, and has to listen to his mum tell him, “You've been a great disappointment to me.” Geez, you might as well keep drinking all night and sleeping in your clothes. Australian director Ruane delivers a pleasing dark comedy in his first film. His account of the escalating travails of the scraggly, struggling Carl sustains enough of a distance and dryness to give even its violent elements a droll flair. The film ambles along, never finding the big laughs or the even tone that another director might have, but its raggedness and looseness feel rather right, like Neill's character and the scruffy Melbourne milieu it presents to us. Some Yanks may find it tough to buy the rugged hero of Jurassic Park as one of life's losers, but he can convince them if they'll give him the time. Neill has the look, the shuffle, the torpor of a guy who just hasn't gotten his shit together. And when you hear his frail-looking but steel-solid mother (Hawley in a saber-sharp turn) harp on him for his failures, you feel the loser's hackles rise and understand his desire to send her the way of the kitchen assistant. Carides is appealing as the barmaid for whom Carl endures these disasters, and Clarke fine as the gravedigger pal who gets sucked into Carl's troubles. The film succeeds not only in providing some dry laughs but in making you feel your life hasn't turned out so bad after all.