Kate Winslet kicked off her big-screen career with an unforgettable role as a murderous teenager in Peter Jackson’s electrifying New Zealand drama Heavenly Creatures. Now in Jocelyn Moorhouse’s ramshackle black comedy (from Rosalie Ham’s novel), she plays an Australian woman returning to the remote home town from which she was removed as a child amid rumours of deadly playground deeds. The film opens as a western, with Winslet’s dressmaker Tilly Dunnage arriving in lonely Dungatar, a Pale Rider sheriff here to clean up this godforsaken town, armed only with a Singer sewing machine.
From here, it mutates into a small-town social satire replete with ostracised madwomen, libidinous dignitaries and cross-dressing cops, before downshifting via unexpected loss into a John Waters-style revenge romp, climaxing in weddings, funerals and theatrical Shakespearean wrath. Tonally, it’s all over the place, veering between the droll antipodean comedy of a Castlemaine XXXX advert and the ripe melodrama of a 1950s soap opera penned by someone off their heads on tea and dope cake (“hash” brownies are an important plot point).
Moorhouse shares writing credits with her husband, PJ Hogan, and there’s more than a touch of the cracked darkness that underpinned their Muriel’s Wedding as events veer between tragedy and comedy, often within a scene, at times within a single sentence. Winslet plays Tilly with the same temptress zeal that drove her Tula in Romance & Cigarettes, while Judy Davis is in firecracker form as her mother, “Mad” Molly Dunnage, who lives “on the hill, above the tip” and of whom this wretched town is at once ashamed and afraid.
