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INTRODUCING THE DWIGHTS
Directed by: Cherie Nowlan.
Written by: Keith Thompson.
Produced by: Rosemary Blight.
Director of Photography: Mark Wareham.
Edited by: Scott Gray.
Music by: Martin Armiger.
Released by: Warner Independent Pictures.
Country of Origin: Australia. 104 min. Rated R.
With: Brenda Blethyn, Khan Chittenden, Emma Booth, Richard Wilson, Frankie J. Holden & Philip Quast.

Jean Dwight (Brenda Blethyn) lives for the spotlight when she’s on stage as “The Raunchy Homemaker,” whether dreaming and singing to classic rock amidst her show biz memorabilia at home or over the stove at her restaurant day job. Inspired by writer Keith Thompson’s English childhood hanging out with his mother’s dance band, Jean’s night life takes place in the clubs around Sydney. (Down Under the film was titled Clubland). He wrote this role with whirlwind Blethyn in mind, but how could he have imagined that she could get down and dirty singing a cover of Tina Turner’s “Nutbush City Limits”?

Jean shares billing with naked showgirls, ventriloquists, and balloon tricks (Blethyn co-wrote her comedy routines). While she tells salacious jokes in her stand-up act from the perspective of a woman “on the wrong side of 50,” her grown sons discover love and sex behind her back, and very much over her objections. Twenty-year-old Tim (a heartbreakingly gentle Khan Chittenden) has a moving truck business and begins dating one of his clients, willowy blonde Jill (a feisty Emma Booth), both nervously on the rebound. She can’t get wait to get him alone, but he has to call his mum that he’s not coming home. His anxiety and determined efforts to please the two women in his life are touchingly palpable.

Tim shepherds his mother to work and, as her best audience, listens to her non-stop spiel. With some shade of Lasse Hallström’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, he also has to watch out for his cerebral palsy-like brain-damaged brother Mark (Richard Wilson, exuberantly unrecognizable from The Proposition). But even Mark is growing up, having a girlfriend with Down syndrome. Tim and Mark’s divorced dad, John (Frankie J. Holden), also cheerfully tries to reclaim the spotlight from when he was a one-hit pop wonder, performing Conway Twitty love songs for store security cameras.

For the first time in years, Jean has a couple of exciting booking possibilities, including with an old favorite comedian (a smoothly oblivious Philip Quast). However, Jill not only distracts Tim, but proves she can also be responsible for Mark, all of which strike at the core of Jean’s resentments about her frustrated career, failed marriage, and maternal obligations, bringing her to her boiling point.

What makes the characters all so appealing is that everyone is vulnerable. Their insecurities cause them to need each other, even as each knows and takes advantage of the other’s vulnerabilities. The mother constantly warns her sons about previous catastrophes from their pasts – when Mark wandered off or Tim had an earlier crush named Samantha, as Jean intentionally calls Jill in a nasty reminder.

But no one is a monster, not even Jean (though she comes so close in humiliating Tim that Jill calls her “a f------ nightmare”) or a stereotype. It is refreshingly unusual to have a frank, sexy, and sweet two-generational story so even-handed about both parent and child learning where to draw the line and how to embrace the future, followed by a group hug and an inimitably redeeming finale.

Introducing the Dwights follows in the heartwarming tradition of P. J. Hogan’s Muriel’s Wedding and Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom with their eccentric families in love with their popular culture obsessions as much as each other. Other less well-known romantic Australian charmers with a music backdrop are Shirley Barrett’s Love Serenade and Chris Kennedy’s Doing Time for Patsy Cline, both starring Miranda Otto. Nora Lee Mandel
July 4, 2007