Rob Sitch (1997)

In a couple of weeks’ time, I’ll re-view Orson Welles’s version of The Trial (1962) but watching Rob Sitch’s The Castle wasn’t a Kafka warm-up.  This is an Australian comedy, regarded in its native land as ‘one of the greatest Australian films ever made’ (Wikipedia), though I’d not heard of it until recently.  It’s a David and Goliath story, somewhat in the Ealing Studios tradition of Whisky Galore! (1949), Passport to Pimlico (1949) and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953):  a determined underdog community defies the powers-that-be.  To be more precise, this is, as a TV newscaster describes it at one point in the film, a ‘Darryl and Goliath’ story:  the main character is paterfamilias Darryl Kerrigan (Michael Caton).  Sitch’s movie takes its name from the adage that an Englishman’s home is his castle.  The Kerrigan family lives in Coolaroo, a blue-collar suburb of Melbourne.  Their house is slap bang next to an airport runway.  Federal authorities serve the Kerrigans and their neighbours with a compulsory acquisition order on their properties, the land on which these stand to be developed as part of a planned airport expansion.  Darryl fights the eviction.  The case goes all the way to the Australian High Court.  The little guy, a six-footer with a towering personality, wins.

There are two big differences between Sitch’s threatened protagonist and his Ealing comedy counterparts.  Ealing warriors are self-interested and resourceful, a combination more than enough to outwit vested interests trying to encroach on their territory and/or control their lives.  (Bill Forsyth both celebrated and subverted such confrontations in Local Hero (1983):  as residents of a Scottish coastal village get to like the idea of hefty compensation payments and a share of oil revenues, the representatives of the Texas energy conglomerate looking to develop a North Sea oil refinery become, in different ways, starry-eyed about the place.)  Money isn’t the issue for Darryl Kerrigan.  He’s offered seventy thousand dollars in compensation for eviction and, when he objects, an extra twenty thousand but financial inducements are beside the point:  Darryl just doesn’t want to move.  Compared with Ealing progenitors, he’s a kind of secular version of the holy fool; his wife Sal (Anne Tenney), their grown-up children and others set to lose their homes through the airport development, are no different.  Far from challenging Darryl’s unworldliness, his family, and neighbours like Farouk (Costas Kilias), the Lebanese refugee next door, look up to him.

The Castle has a basic storyline and its against-the-odds outcome is never in doubt.  Rob Sitch and his co-writers (Santa Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Jane Kennedy) have little time for plot complications:  the film runs only eighty-four minutes and most of them are devoted to repeated illustrations of Darryl’s invincible naivety and the Kerrigan family’s routines.  Whenever a plane goes past their window they can’t hear themselves speak; the house is also adjacent to a toxic landfill; but Darryl thinks they live the life of Riley.  He drives a tow truck, breeds racing greyhounds that seldom win, carries out skew-whiff renovations to his castle and keeps adding to its supply of tacky, wacky décor, acquired at what Darryl reckons bargain prices.  Two of his and Sal’s three sons, Steve (Anthony Simcoe) and Dale (Stephen Curry), still live at home:  nearly every bit of Steve’s dialogue is reading out to his father small ads in trading papers from the pre-eBay era.  Whatever’s for sale – jousting sticks, for example – Darryl always replies, ‘What’s he asking?’ and, when Steve supplies the answer, ‘Tell him he’s dreaming’.

Steve’s an apprentice mechanic; Dale, youngest of four and the film’s narrator, digs holes.  Their elder siblings have flown the coop in different ways:  Wayne (Wayne Hope) is in prison for armed robbery; the boys’ only sister, Tracey (Sophie Lee), has recently married Con Petropoulous (Eric Bana), an accountant and kick-boxing enthusiast.  Tracey is a hairdresser:  as Darryl never tires of saying, the day she brought home her hairdressing diploma was the proudest day of his life.  He, Sal, Steve and Dale always eat together and Darryl never fails to enthuse about his wife’s culinary efforts:  ‘What d’you call that, darl?’ he asks in wondering tones.  The answer will be rissoles or chicken or ice cream but Darryl will then say, ‘Yeah, but what did you do with it?’  The Castle is so focused on the Kerrigans’ exceeding innocence and dumb remarks that it doesn’t bother to make the forces they’re up against even superficially crafty or formidable.  Dennis Denuto (Tiriel Mora), the small-time local solicitor whom Darryl persuades to represent the family and their neighbours in court, turns out to be more inept than his clients:  it’s not just that Dennis is clueless about constitutional law; he can’t cope with his office photocopier.  A legal deus ex machina arrives in the form of genial retired barrister Lawrence Hammill (Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell), who does understand constitutional law, devises an ‘on just terms’ argument citing Section 51(xxxi) of the Australian Constitution, and gets Darryl and co their High Court victory.

Shot in eleven days on a budget of less than a million Australian dollars, The Castle made more than ten million at the box office and the cachet claimed for it on Wikipedia turns out to be no exaggeration:  a 2022 piece in the Guardian explains its enduring popularity and cultural imprint in Australia[1].  Watching the film, I found it just about laugh-free:  the comedy, deliberately repetitious, is almost entirely dependent on the Kerrigans’ simple-mindedness.  Yet I started to have second thoughts as soon as it was over.  Most of the actors play straight – they don’t make fun of their characters, even if their lines do.  In 1997 Michael Caton was a familiar face on Australian television; Bud Tingwell had had plenty of film roles; Robyn Nevin was an esteemed actress, particularly in the theatre.  (She has a cameo here, as a baffled judge.)  In the years since, the two younger standouts in the cast, Stephen Curry and Eric Bana, have gone on to successful careers – Curry in Australian film and TV, Bana internationally.  When The Castle was made, though, few of the actors were famous.  This makes their well-judged playing all the more likeable and the orchestration of performances does Rob Sitch credit.  Viewing a few YouTube clips in order to write this note was very different from seeing the whole thing – and did make me smile.  The Kerrigan family’s hearts are in the right place; I think I now see that the film’s is, too.

2 April 2024

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/mar/19/its-the-vibe-25-years-on-how-the-castle-became-an-australian-classic