What do you have to do to make Wake in Fright relevant again? The answer, quite simply, is nothing. Kenneth Cook’s lean and muscular 143-page novel still packs a hell of a punch. And like Ted Kotcheff’s masterful 1971 adaptation – Australian cinema’s pièce de résistance of small-town outback films – it has aged only in the manner of fine wine.
The core themes are perhaps more relevant than ever – from small-town parochialism, to the city-versus-rural divide and Australia’s heavy drinking, heavy gambling culture. In their attempts to find a reason (other than the obvious cash/ratings grab) to readapt Cook’s page-turner when Kotcheff’s film did the job so brilliantly, director Kriv Stenders and screenwriter Stephen M Irwin switch the timeline to the present day for Network Ten’s new two-part miniseries.
In the process they demonstrate how little contemporisation means for this particular text. How different does a debilitated, single room school in the middle of dirt-clogged nowhere look now compared with one in the 60s or 70s? How different does a shabby, rundown small-town pub look? Or a country road? Or a stretch of sun-parched Australian desert? The answer, of course, is little or nothing at all.
In other words: the themes of Wake in Fright don’t need to be updated as they are still achingly relevant. And much of the visual environment cannot be updated because key settings are more or less timeless. Therefore Stenders and Irwin (who recently collaborated on the ambitious but oversauced multicultural drama Australia Day) resolve to tinker around the edges.
This is why the school teacher protagonist John Grant (Sean Keenan from Glitch) suddenly finds himself in a brand new, swanky modern house owned by Tim Hynes (Gary Sweet). As Hynes drives Grant through the streets of Bundanyabba (aka “the Yabba”) where Grant is marooned after losing all his money playing two-up, he ruefully explains that the mine has shut down. Though “things will pick up, mark my words”.
One of the core questions in Cook’s book concerns why residents of the Yabba are so proud of their backwater, middle-of-nowhere locale, which city slickers regard as a shithole. This new adaptation fails to even propose an interesting answer. One was given by Cook himself who, curiously, wrote that the local people “are saved from stark insanity” by a shared belief that cold beer is a sign of progress.
Another is explored in director Stephan Elliott’s underrated 1997 satire Welcome to Woop Woop. The ringleader of Elliott’s arid, titular town, Daddy-O (Rod Taylor) goes on a jingoistic rant in order to quell an attempt at uprising from a John Grant-esque outsider (protagonist Teddy, played by Johnathon Schaech). Daddy-O chastises the pollies and “wretched craniums” in Sydney’s Martin Place. By contrast, he describes the community’s far-flung desert home as: “Too fuckin’ dry. Too fuckin’ hot. Too many bloody flies. But it’s ours.”
In Stenders’ new Wake in Fright, John Grant now encounters cartoonish drug dealers and lowlifes (Anna Samson and Lee Jones). These characters are underwritten and overacted and play a part in shifting the focus from cold beer as a sign of progress to a general thirst for mind-altering drugs.
The ever-bankable David Wenham is police sergeant Jock Crawford (played in the film by Chips Rafferty, in his final performance). Caren Pistorius is the Yabba’s troubled nurse (and Grant’s sort-of love interest) Janette Hynes. Alex Dimitriades plays the Yabba’s fallen-from-grace, once resident doctor, Doc Tydon.
When Doc, dressed only in an apron outside his caravan home, hands Grant a beer and some pills, describing them as “basically aspirin”, there is a hint that perhaps Tydon has been reimagined as a kind of Dr Gonzo Down Under. Dimitriades understands the necessary layers of his character: wearied, misanthropical and carnal, both sexually menacing and, in a bestial sort of way, enticing.
The actor gets that difficult mixture right. But his rejigged Tydon belongs to an uninspiring digression from the original story, in which Grant’s interaction with the aforementioned lowlifes results in standard issue crime story plotting, a la on-the-run parties and menacing druggies. This reduces the impact of Grant’s downward spiralling trajectory, placing more emphasis on external forces.
En route to Grant’s inevitable self-demolition, Stenders’ version crowbars in a traumatic backstory – as if acknowledging the psychological burn of the protagonist’s journey lacks a little heat this time around. Part of Wake in Fright’s brilliance is the posing of an almost Twilight Zone-esque mystery, about the menacing combination of forces that make the schoolteacher go loco.
There’s the alcohol, the lack of money, the festering sense of desperation, the feeling of not belonging. And of course, the heat. In Cook’s novel, suicidal ideation and the taste of gun metal become an appealing thought because “there was nothing else to do, tomorrow offered no hope”. To get the fatalistic grimness of a line like that across, without wallowing in despair, is no easy task.
A homicidally hot, stinky, sunbaked colour scheme would surely have helped. Alas, Stenders and cinematographer Geoffrey Hall (who recently shot Red Dog: True Blue) opt for a much cleaner palette. The new version looks bright rather than burnt, and lacks visual flavour.
Some of that is made up for with a strong, supercilious, stiff-lipped performance from Sean Keenan in the lead role, whose casting was clearly influenced by Gary Bond in the original film (one can only imagine what a wilder choice, such as Aaron Pedersen, would have brought to the role). Keenan doesn’t reinvent or reinterpret the character, that’s for sure, though he was obviously never intended to.
• Wake in Fright is showing on Ten from Sunday 8 October at 8.30pm
