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KANGAROO
★★★★
PG. 107 minutes
In Kangaroo, an egotistical city slicker is stranded in a tiny Outback outpost where he’s forced to get in touch with his better self. It’s a good-natured movie, dispensing an undiluted shot of optimism, but there’s plenty of matter-of-fact bush humour in the mix, too. In this town, they don’t suffer fools gladly.
Ryan Corr and Deborah Mailman in Kangaroo.Credit: Studio Canal
Chris Masterman (Ryan Corr) learns this lesson the hard way after he loses his job as a TV breakfast show presenter in Sydney. Heading west to take up another offer, he accidentally runs over a kangaroo and finds a joey in its pouch. Planning to leave it with the local vet, he discovers that there isn’t one. Nor can he go anywhere else while his damaged sports car is being repaired.
The only person he can interest in his predicament is Charlie (Lily Whiteley), a 12-year-old indigenous girl who’s having her own problems adjusting to the town. She finds him and the joey accommodation in a shed and there he stays while making heavy weather of his efforts to ingratiate himself with the locals.
It’s the kind of film you can enjoy only if you can warm to its characters and this lot offer plenty of incentives to do just that.
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The director, Kate Woods, has a career which ranges from her first feature, Looking for Alibrandi (2000), to episodes of the American series, Law and Order, and The Lincoln Lawyer and she’s gathered an ensemble cast of familiar faces who look very easy in one another’s company. Deborah Mailman is Charlie’s mother, Rosie, who’s making a new life after the death of her husband, Charlie’s father. Ernie Dingo is at his homespun best as garrulous Uncle Dave, the local mechanic, who’s in no hurry to fix Chris’s car, and New Zealand’s Rachel House is Chris’s most formidable critic. She detests him on sight, which is inconvenient as she runs the town’s only pub.
Written by Harry Cripps (The Dry), the script is inspired by the work of Chris “Brolga” Barns and his wife, Tahnee Passmore Barns, who maintain a kangaroo rescue centre on a wildlife reserve near Alice Springs. And some of the Barns’ anecdotes have found their way into the story but Woods and her crew freely acknowledge that the film’s fictional town, Silver Gum, has, at best, a heightened relationship with reality.
The upbeat mood is complemented by a palette bright enough to have been modelled on an old MGM musical. Nonetheless, Chris’s road to redemption is convincing enough. Against all the available evidence, Charlie is confident that he can be relied upon to do the right thing and he gradually begins to believe her. At the same time, she goes on finding other orphaned joeys needing his care and the enclosure outside the shed expands.
I was about to say that it’s refreshing to come across a likeable family film that hasn’t employed CGI when I found that a visual effects team was needed to build up the muscular frame of an alpha male red kangaroo called Roger who becomes Chris’s unwilling patient. A skilled kickboxer, he takes care of the action scenes.
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