22 May 2019

Movie review - Top End Wedding

From At The Movies, 7:33 pm on 22 May 2019

Charm is Australian film director Wayne Blair's stock in trade – he made the popular musical The Sapphires.

Blair's new romantic comedy Top End Wedding has a bicultural message under the laughs, says Simon Morris.

Simon Morris: Australia's historical treatment of its indigenous population has been generally accepted as pretty appalling, and you'd expect that this would be reflected in angry, uncompromising films from its Aboriginal film-makers.

Yet directors like Wayne Blair don't seem interested in making political films that are only seen at earnest film festivals.

Blair first came to our attention with the little charmer The Sapphires, about an Aboriginal girl-group entertaining the troops in Vietnam.

His latest is even more feel-good and commercial, right down to its title – Top End Wedding

Is there any more popular – and populist – format than the wedding movie?

Lauren – played by The Sapphires' Miranda Tapsell, who also co-wrote Top End Wedding – is about to marry Englishman Ned (Bohemian Rhapsody's Gwilym Lee) despite Ned's culturally insensitive family.

But when the couple gets up to the family home in Darwin, Lauren's in for a shock – and not just because Dad's wandering around town in his pajamas and scaring their dog.

It seems Mum's gone walkabout, and not for the first time. We've seen a flashback of Mum's own problematic attitude to weddings when she was a famous runaway bride.

So is there a connection with her two-word farewell note – "I'm done"?

But fiancé Ned is determined not to be defeatist. He may know nothing about Aboriginal culture, but he loves Lauren and is determined to do whatever it takes to get her the wedding she wants.

Lauren and Ned leave Dad in Darwin, and take off even further North, to Australia's fabled "top end". And fortunately for them, Mum has left certain clues along the way.

She seems to have made an impression on everyone she met, including a fraudulent French tour-guide.

The will-they-won't-they-get-married plot is fairly routine, with added complications from Lauren's prickly boss (Kiwi actor Kerry Fox with most of the stops out) and Lauren's besties – sort of surrogate Sapphires – to give it a bit of girls-night-out energy.

But what Top End Wedding is really about is the relationship between the cultures – white dad and Aboriginal Mum, Aboriginal Lauren and Englishman Ned – and how much easier things can be if everyone approaches them with a positive attitude.

Ned, in particular, you'd think, is almost too good to be true – Gwilym Lee effectively reprises his performance as Brian May in Bohemian Rhapsody.

Then he was the world's greatest bandmate, here he's the world's most lovable fiancé.

As I said, the plot and characters are too good to be true – if you were making a Big Important Film, tackling Australia's colonial wrongs. But Top End Wedding isn't that film.

Instead, it's aiming to win over a general audience first, then giving the punters a little something to think about on the way home.

Like most films with the word "wedding" in the title, Top End Wedding is more icing than wholly satisfying cake.

But it showed me stuff I didn't know, and – more importantly– didn't make me feel bad for not knowing it. That's a pretty good balance, all in all.

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