Director: Alan White
Producers: Julio Caro & Alan White
Screenplay: Anik Chooney (a.k.a. Marty Denniss)
Director of Photography: John Swaffield
Music: Don Miller-Robinson
Marty Denniss: Barky
Hugh Jackman: Wace
Aaron Blabey: Trunny
Joel Edgerton: Wayne
Andrew Wholley: Coppa
Leah Vandenberg: Lanny
Marin Mimica: Kane |
"Erskineville Kings" is a film about coming home. It is also about death, grief, love, anger and masculinity.
The film opens with Barky, the central character, standing on a deserted Central railway station platform in Sydney. As Barky meets up with old friends during the day we realise he has come home for his father's funeral.
The film is shot around Erskineville near Sydney airport. While the streets of Erskineville are gritty and run down, the long shots of Barky walking from the station soften the blow.
First time director Alan White's day job in advertising has taught him a thing or two about the camera and producing slick postmodern images. This commercial style comes through in some shots in the film, but seems to work adding to the visual spectacle.
Marty Denniss and Hugh Jackman give great performances as brothers Barky and Wace. Their relationship is central to the film's narrative. We discover Wace's resentment and sense of betrayal towards the younger Barky, who left home a couple of years earlier leaving Wace to care for their aging father. Barky's flashback to a violent attack by his father gives some indication of why he might have decided to flee the family home.
After a tense reunion, the brothers and a couple of friends head to the local Kings Hotel where the tension mounts as more and more beer is consumed.
The pub scenes are the most dramatic in the film, but this is also where some problems creep in. The presence of the brothers' friends seems problematic. Their dialogue and performances are wooden and detract from the powerful performances of Jackman and Denniss. This minor hitch aside, "Erskineville Kings" gives us a fresh and provocative look at the complex issue of male identity and how men deal with a whole range of emotions.
It was refreshing to see an Australian film tackling these issues with a good amount of realism, and while there was a fair amount of beer drinking, pool playing and physical violence in the mix, I was left with a sense that director White had managed to convey both the problems men face in dealing with their emotions and the potential they have for expressing them positively.
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