I Screen Studies

Draft of an entry for the Intellect Directory of Australian and New Zealand Cinema (forthcoming 2010)

Director: PJ Hogan

Screenwriter: PJ Hogan

Producers: Lynda House and Jocelyn Moorhouse

Cinematographer: Martin McGrath

Production Designer: Patrick Reardon

Editor: Jill Bilcock

Genre: comedy

Duration: 101 mins

Cast: Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, Sophie Lee, Bill Hunter, Jeanie Drynan, Matt Day, Daniel Lapaine

Synopsis:

At a wedding reception in the beachside town of Porpoise Spit, Muriel (Toni Collette) catches the bouquet thrown by bride Tania (Sophie Lee), much to Tania and her catty bridesmaids’ dismay. Later, Muriel stumbles on the groom and one of the bridesmaids in flagrante delicto. Another guest realises that Muriel is wearing a stolen dress, and calls the police. Muriel’s father Bill (Bill Hunter), a local politician, convinces the policemen to drop the investigation. At a local nightclub, Tania is consoled by her girlfriends after her husband admits various indiscretions. The girls convince Tania to go on holiday with them to Hibiscus Island instead of going on her honeymoon. Muriel is dumped from the gang because they feel she is not ‘on their level’. Muriel’s mother Betty (Jeanie Drynan) gives her a blank cheque, made out to cash, to buy cosmetics from her new employer Deirdre, with whom Bill is having an affair. Muriel uses the money to pay for a holiday to Hibiscus Island, where she meets an old school friend, Rhonda (Rachel Griffiths), who has also been treated miserably by Tania and her gang. The gang humiliate Muriel and try to prise Rhonda away from her; Rhonda tells Tania about the bridesmaid’s affair with her husband. Rhonda and Muriel win a talent quest with their rendition of the ABBA song ‘Waterloo’. Muriel returns to Porpoise Spit to learn that her deception has been discovered, and immediately runs away to Sydney. She moves in with Rhonda, changes her name to ‘Mariel’ and finds a job in a video store. Mariel’s first date with the clumsy Brice (Matt Day) ends in disaster when Rhonda inexplicably falls to the ground and is unable to move her legs. A tumour is discovered on Rhonda’s spine, and she is confined to a wheelchair. Mariel phones home to discover that her father is under investigation for official graft. Rhonda makes Mariel promise that they will never go back to Porpoise Spit. Mariel visits all the bridal wear shops in Sydney to try on wedding dresses and indulge her marriage fantasies. She gains the sympathy of shop assistants by making up terrible stories about her family so that they will take a photograph of her in the dress. Rhonda finds Mariel’s album full of photographs, and confronts her in a bridal shop. Mariel cries that she wants to get married in order to leave the old Muriel behind. Rhonda is told that her cancer has returned, and that she will never walk again. Responding to an advertisement in a singles column, Mariel meets South African swimmer David (Daniel LaPaine) who must marry an Australian to gain citizenship in order to fulfil his dream of swimming in the Olympics. Mariel and David are married in a sumptuous ceremony. Rhonda refuses to be a bridesmaid, and tells Mariel she has betrayed her, as Rhonda now must go back to Porpoise Spit to live with her mother. Mariel’s mother Betty only just arrives in time to see the wedding vows; she also sees Deirdre on Bill’s arm. In a supermarket back in Porpoise Spit, Betty is arrested for absent-mindedly shoplifting a pair of shoes. Bill again convinces the police to drop the charges, telling the sergeant in his wife’s hearing “You can see she’s not right in the head”. Bill tells Betty he is leaving her for Deirdre, and blames Betty and his family for his failings as a politician.  Betty commits suicide. At her funeral, a telegram of condolence from former Prime Minister Bob Hawke is read out; Bill has arranged this for the benefit of the press who are covering his ongoing trial. Mariel rushes out of the church, overcome by her father’s insensitivity and self-centredness. She is reunited with David, and they spend the night together. In the morning, Mariel tells David she doesn’t love him. She goes back to her family home, where Bill pressures her to stay and help him raise her siblings. She refuses, and pays back some of the money she stole from him. Mariel goes to Rhonda’s house to take her back to Sydney. Together, Mariel and Rhonda leave Porpoise Spit forever.

Critique

Muriel’s Wedding is one of the most important Australian films of the 1990s. Along with films like Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrmann, 1992) and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliott, 1994), Muriel’s Wedding helped define the ‘quirky comedy’, a subgenre of Australian cinema that met with great success domestically and internationally in the 1990s.  The film also launched the careers of many of its leading players. After her first feature film role in Muriel’s Wedding, Toni Collette built her reputation with a string of strong performances in Australian features including Lilian’s Story (Jerzy Domaradki, 1996) and The Boys (Rowan Woods, 1998) before she was chosen by director Todd Haynes to star alongside Ewan McGregor in the 1970s glam rock film Velvet Goldmine (1998). The following year marked her Hollywood breakthrough, with her Academy Award-nominated role in M. Night Shyamalan’s blockbuster hit The Sixth Sense (1999). In 2010, Collette won a Golden Globe award for her role in the American television series The United States of Tara.  Muriel’s Wedding also marked the feature debut of Rachel Griffiths, who plays Muriel’s best friend Rhonda. After a supporting role in director PJ Hogan’s next film, the Hollywood comedy My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), Griffiths worked around the world on a variety of Australian and international films and television programs, before settling in Los Angeles and landing a starring role as Brenda in the acclaimed HBO series Six Feet Under. Matt Day, who plays Muriel’s first boyfriend Brice, also made his feature film debut here.

Muriel’s Wedding is an ugly duckling story about a fantasist and habitual liar who seeks an escape from the dullness of her family life and from the pain of being ostracised by the cool girls in the music of ABBA and in dreams of marriage. Regularly humiliated by her father, a crooked local politician, who publicly abuses Muriel and her slothful siblings as “useless” and “dead weights”, Muriel suffers further indignity when she is cruelly shunned by the awful Tania and her gang for her unfashionable hairstyle and clothes, for her size, and worst of all, for listening to 70s music.  It is only after she meets Rhonda, a free spirit who accepts Muriel for who she (says she) is (because Muriel cannot help herself, and deceives Rhonda just as she deceives everyone else), that Muriel gains self-confidence and the will to escape the small-minded, selfish, small-town attitudes of Porpoise Spit.  Dancing with Rhonda and miming to ABBA’s ‘Waterloo’, dressed in a blonde wig and stunning white outfit, Muriel is given the first glimpse of the swan that she can become.

For a time, her friendship with Rhonda and her new life in the big city keeps her obsessive-compulsive disorder at bay, but when Rhonda is diagnosed with cancer and Muriel becomes her carer, Muriel quickly lapses back into a world of ABBA, lies, and wedding fantasies. Ultimately it takes the death of her mother and her father’s attempts to turn this, like everything, to his personal advantage, to make her realise that her own selfishness and deceptions have almost destroyed the one thing that can save her – her friendship with Rhonda.

Muriel’s Wedding turns on Muriel’s transformation, and ultimately on her realisation that her fantasy of a traditional white wedding and marriage will not bring her the happiness she craves. Her decision to reject her perfect husband, and choose instead life with her friend Rhonda, subverts the romantic comedy convention of resolving the narrative through the (re)union of a heterosexual couple. And her choice of mateship over matrimony also invests this celebrated Australian trait with a new value as Muriel clearly rejects the older, male-centred mateship practiced by her father in his dealings with the police, with developers, and with his political mentors. In these things the film is respectably radical, but the film is not beyond resorting to well-worn caricatures of small town Australians who are variously presented as ugly, slothful, bitchy, venal, unfaithful, and shallow. The city, and specifically Sydney (‘City of Brides’ as an on-screen title announces), is by contrast a place of excitement, love, passion, and the future.  Australian audiences have shown time and again, from the ocker comedies onwards, that they are prepared to laugh at, and sometimes with, ugly Australian characters. Overseas marketing also played on this stereotype; the tagline for the French poster was “Elle est grosse, elle est bête, elle est Australienne” (“She is fat, she is stupid, she is Australian”). Of course, by the end of the film, her size is no longer an issue, and she is clearly not stupid, but she remains inevitably, an Australian. Muriel’s transformation is physical as much as mental, evident in the contrasting shots of her face as she travels by taxi at various points in the film. Returning from Hibiscus Island she is sunburnt, pimple-nosed and dowdy; leaving for Sydney with Rhonda at the end of the film she is delicately made-up, and glowing, with a beatific smile playing on her lips.

Mention must also be made of the tragic character Betty, Muriel’s mother, who suffers with stoic dignity her husband’s verbal abuse and infidelity, who arrives late at her daughter’s wedding only to be passed unseen when Muriel walks up the aisle out of the church after the service, and whose absent-mindedness leads to arrest and humiliation in the police station. In the car on the way home after being released from custody her desperate, heartfelt request to her husband for help in coping with the pressures of their family life, is brutally cut off in mid-sentence when he dismissively turns on the radio. And in a final indignity after Bill announces that he wants a divorce, she is assaulted by her own son, Perry. When she commits suicide, Bill manages to turn it to his advantage, believing that claiming she died of a heart attack will aid his case in court and with the press, just as he uses her funeral as a platform for his own interests. Ultimately, though, she has the last word; she sets fire to the back garden – the sacred quarter acre block – because Perry would not mow it, leaving the iconic Hills Hoist with the singed remnants of a load of washing forlornly hanging amid the smoky waste. This is a powerful image, suggesting the devastating bush fires that regularly ravage country areas, but alongside the destruction and the almost sacrilegious attack on the washing line, there is also the promise of new growth through the fire’s regenerative potential.