Tuesday, November 18, 2003
The Problem of Character in Horseplay
Originally published in Metro 138, 2003.
Australian film has a habit of returning to the familiar. Quirky, lovable losers with hearts of gold fighting a battle against something much bigger and much more powerful. Take The Castle (Rob Sitch, 1997) for example. The Kerrigans are simple folk; they breed greyhounds, hunt for obscure bargains in The Trading Post, and are seemingly untouched by the culinary influence of years of immigration. The Castle spends a good deal of screen time affectionately rendering the quirky world of the Kerrigans in order to create an emotional link between the characters and the audience. So when their crises inevitably arise, we are drawn in to their world deep enough to care which way the High Court decides.
Stavros Kazantzidis’ Horseplay (2003), however, is less successful in connecting us with its characters. Essentially a caper film, Horseplay tracks the attempts of Max MacKendrick (Marcus Graham) to work his way into Melbourne’s horse racing establishment, a closed shop of exclusivity. Max thinks that marrying Alicia (Tushka Bergen), the daughter of legendary trainer Barry Coxhead (Bill Hunter), is a step in the right direction, but Barry is adamant that Max will never get near his money or his horses, and manages to have Max warned off courses for life after dobbing him in for a Fine Cotton-esque ring-in scam. Thus begins the frantic scramble for Max to make money and get back on top. It involves gambling on a huge scale and the kidnap of a jockey’s wife, and it all culminates with the Melbourne Cup, where several stories collide, several characters get killed, and several subplots rather messily resolve.
Certainly, its characters are quirky and often amusing, but they lack the essential humanity which would take them from mere parodies to real people. Though we may be meant to hate them, it feels at times as if we are supposed to hate them for what they represent, not what they do or who they are. Paul Byrnes suggests that ‘it’s fine to hate your characters because they’re hateful, but they still need to be recognisably human to be funny’.
Horseplay falls into two traps in particular. Kazantzidis is over-reliant on the quirkiness of characters, presumably in the hope that amusing individual traits will distract the audience from the lack of genuine character development. Similarly, the contempt that Kazantzidis feels for his characters, with the exception of perhaps the two leads, is palpable, and he allows this contempt to infuse each and every character so that in the end some of them are little more than a series of reprehensible acts or irritating habits.
Part of this is attributable to Kazantzidis tendency to create caricatures, not characters. Certainly, the Kerrigans had their quirks, but the characters in Horseplay are defined almost exclusively by them. Max’s accountant, Henry (Jason Donovan) is a sex addict with a schoolgirl fetish – this is established in the opening voice over – thus for the rest of the film he does little more than have sex in increasingly comic environs. Certainly he assists Max with his scam, but even that is subservient to his raging libido. Kidnapper Seamus (Robert Menzies), despite having one of the film’s more potent motivations, is little more than a bumbling figure of fun. His jockey brother was murdered by Barry Coxhead, so Seamus honours him by wearing his riding silks every Melbourne Cup day. But even the possible poignancy of this gesture is overlooked and played for laughs.
And Bill Hunter plays Bill Hunter. Sure, he’s called Barry Coxhead, but it’s the same menacing patriarch that Bill Hunter has played over and over again (I suspect his involvement in a project is a prerequisite for AFC funding – look out for Bad Eggs later this year), and his menacing presence is enough for even a faintly experienced patron of Australian cinema to fill in the gaps. The end result is a film peopled with characters who hold little for the audience except fleeting amusement or rather more prolonged irritation.
And they are overwhelmingly bad. Not bad in the sense that they are villains, but bad in that they are for the most part unattractive and unlikeable. But even this would not necessarily be a hindrance if Kazantzidis had have given them some sort of motivation that would help us to understand why they are all such ugly people. Part of this problem is that most of the dramatic conflict that would have given us some sort of insight into the characters, particularly Max, goes unseen, and is covered only by a Narrator (voiced enigmatically by Hugo Weaving).
But a bigger problem is that Kazantzidis refuses to allow his characters any sort of emotional space in which to move, preferring instead for them to simply be a ‘type’. Max’s wife Alicia is a screeching harridan of a social climber, but we never know why. We’re not allowed to get close to her because we never see her make any decisions; we never know how she reacts when something is at stake, and we never really know what is driving her to be so horrid. It’s enough for us to hate her merely because she is an amalgam of the worst of Melbourne’s social elite. Horseplay wants us to hate its characters instantly because of what they represent, but not to sympathise with them, or relate to them, or to feel for them.
There is an exception to this, of course. Becky Wodinski (Abbie Cornish), is the Joker in Kazanztidis’ pack, and though the film is based in the world of Max MacKendrick, by the time the subplots eventually converge it is Becky’s story. In contrast to Max, who is essentially at the whim of the characters around him and thus has little agency of his own, Becky faces her own choices. Her story is the most compelling in the film because we are allowed to see the moments where she makes choices that could see her losing something important. She relinquishes the security of her home life when she walks out on her father, she gives up any sort of social acceptance when she tells her awful friends to get lost, and she chooses to stay mum about a murder because she might get the money she needs out of it. Like when Dale Kerrigan tells the other side to suffer in their jocks at the end of The Castle, Becky’s journey evokes in the audience the sort of empathy and emotional involvement that makes her victory so much richer.
In the end, though, one thoroughly-drawn character in a cast of about a dozen is not quite enough. The prospect of a Melbourne Cup caper film had me excited for a while, but by the time anything in the film was at stake, I had long since ceased to have any emotional involvement. By not allowing his audience to form a bond with his characters (or caricatures), Kazantzidis unfortunately condemns his film to a string of inconsequential set pieces. So in the end, when most of them ended up dead, broke, or cast out, I didn’t really care.