Cast: Samuel Johnson, Colin Friels, Sacha Horler, Kestie Morassi, Jessica Napier, Sarah Pierce, Jason Gann, Paul Sonkkila, Brian Meegan.

Gary Kelp (Samuel Johnson) works for Info Digest, a company that condenses books for readers who have neither the time nor the inclination to read the whole originals. Such readers, obviously chronically pressed for time and anxious due to stress, ensure that 90% of their non-fiction books are on the subject of health. Gary’s current project is called The Illustrated Family Doctor. It’s the sort of light-weight encyclopaedic tome with brightly coloured pathological conditions in gruesome photographs guaranteed to increase worry and consequently the market for such books. Somewhat like the drug companies who have a vested interest in keeping us all a little bit sick.

When his father dies Gary is horrified to learn that his mother, who is coincidentally slowly losing her marbles, has given permission for the harvesting of his organs. This catalyses Gary into some deeply meaningful questions such as Who are we separate from our bodies? and Are we more than the sum of our parts? Stymied by this intrusion of Philosophy and Metaphysics 101 into his otherwise meaningless life, Gary starts gradually to manifest some of the more irritating and alarming symptoms in The Illustrated Family Doctor. Merely working on it churns his stomach into knots.

Gary’s boss Bob Boundary (Brian Meegan) is the kind of breezy fellow who successfully avoids anything deeply meaningful by proudly relating how a fiction author congratulated the Info Digest on improving his original novel with their condensed version and by dealing with any staff issues (such as Gary’s aversion to his subject) with the sort of formulaic approach one gains from The Condensed Book of One-Minute Management.

Gary’s girlfriend Jennifer (Kestie Morassi), a nurse with a professional insensitivity to suffering, is increasingly irritated by Gary’s angst. Gary’s sister Carol (Sacha Horler) steams around in a simmering rage; his mother, played by Sarah Pierce (sometimes spelt Peirse or Pierse) is chronically depressed and there is a very strange individual called Snapper Thompson (the cadaverous Paul Sonkkila), a ‘colourful identity’ hovering around the corridors of the Info Digest. The latter lectures Gary bizarrely and with menacing intensity on the right eye drops for his worrisome eye condition. Among all these disconnected and mis-connecting relationships Gary encounters a former acquaintance, Carl (Jason Gann), now a guitar playing busker and writer. Carl’s pretentious over-certainty makes Gary even more worried about where he is going but it appeals mightily to the shallow, disaffected Jennifer. Then there are two other minor characters who with apparent randomness affect Gary’s life: Christine (Jessica Napier) a lounge bar casualty on a careening path without brakes and her jealous husband.

Most influential on Gary is the mentor-like Ray (a superb Colin Friels) who alone seems to keep his own counsel and remain detached from the absurdities of their business and life in general. It’s a relief Ray keeps the deleted good bits from novels he condenses on disk in his desk drawer, like hidden jewels the value of which no-one else appreciates. There’s a remote chance Gary will learn detachment and balance from Ray.

As a black comedy the film needs a light touch. However, there is rather too much heaviness, the suppressed anger in all the characters is too unconscious and too vicious, and the pace of the movie is tediously slow.  Gary’s increasing sickness is a symbol of the ineffectual contrivances all the characters manifest in trying to avoid actually dealing with the issues in their lives. The tone is apathetic and frustrated and the feel of the film is therefore frustrating instead of amusing, boring instead of illuminating.

With a talented cast, the acting is fine despite characters who are not sympathetic and too tiresome to be interesting, with the exception of Colin Friels’ Ray. It’s an uncomfortable film to watch because it mimics many people’s experience of their lives with only an oblique alternative inserted at the end like a surgical transplant. Tedium, alienation, absurdity, seemingly random, bizarre outcomes, lives careening out of control – these elements need tight handling and lots of absurd humour to make them palatable and entertaining. The film could be shorter and snappier. In fact, condensed.

The feeling of claustrophobia, of being boxed and trapped is conveyed by the set, the office cubicles, pub and uninspired living spaces and is all too palpable. Superb make-up makes Gary’s progressive illness unnervingly real.

Indicating the director’s experience and success in television commercials, the satirical humour works best in short episodic segments of subplot such as when Gary meets Carl. Unemployed Carl’s beaming confidence and dismissal of Gary, his appearance and his job is a lovely reversal of expectations. Belying the actual nonsense of his words Carl is full of himself and didactic formulae sounding like secrets for success.  Nevertheless the disjointed subplots seem peripheral, the director not able to avoid the trap of depicting disconnection by making his audience suffer along with the characters.

There’s much suppressed violence in this film – whether in the original novel or just the film, I cannot say, because I’ve not read the novel. The violence comes out in a distorted fashion against the main character as well as in the characters’ lack of connection and in the violence they do to each other.

With potential to make a brilliant comment on the compartmentalised, pre-digested elements of modern life, this Australian movie is disappointing. The story feels like it is made up of several bits of other stories – like Ray’s ‘good bits’ in his desk drawer. The resolution at the end is not enough to save the movie.

© Avril Carruthers                                                            5^th March 2005