Review by Jane Freebury
The last time I remember being on the Hawkesbury River in an Australian movie was afloat in that fantastic glass church, the centrepiece in Oscar and Lucinda. This time the winking river slides underneath the hull of a tinny runabout, past the endless bushland along its banks. No sign of habitation except for an occasional fibro house punctuating the shoreline.
The Oyster Farmer has a great sense of place, and projecting a majesterial and boundless landscape is what works best in this latest flagship for Australian cinema, a UK-financed production. Interludes in long shot that admire the scenery are stirring, and meant to be, with a lilting Celtic score on the musictrack. I predict a holiday rush on Hawkesbury houseboats in the near future.
The Oyster Farmer has been getting a warm critical reception but for me it was a gentle, good natured and meandering entertainment, with little dramatic development to speak of, little that was convincing anyway. The eccentric Aussie types adrift from the mainstream – the oyster farmers and their itinerant workers, a gang of Vietnam vets who’ve gone bush, various odd bods like Slug whose job is sewerage, and stoic women who would rather be somewhere else – are loosely connected through random events, but these are characters who have little impact on each other to speak of.
They’d just jostle each other irritably here, like the river’s flotsam and jetsam, and there hasn’t been such a display of the colourful local vernacular in many a year.
Which is disappointing when there are lively and novel ideas at work in writer/director Anna Reeves’ screenplay – and I don’t just mean the fruit-wrap balaclava, the lobster cosh, and the bath lined with marbles. Also the young couple Pearl and Jack are played with engaging natural charm by newcomers Diana Glenn and Alex O’Lachlan.
Kerry Armstrong is always good, and Jim Norton as Brownie’s garrulous Dad is fun, but the other types on parade are rather shop-worn. Like little Aussie battler Brownie and the biffo who needs anger management therapy.
The Oyster Farmer ultimately suffers from its disinclination for getting under the skin of its characters to find out what really makes them tick. Some might feel this patchwork piece has a good-natured ramshackle charm, but haven’t we been here and done that – over the last thirty years of the Australian film revival?
3 stars