# Spotswood (1991)

### reviewed by
Frank Maloney

                                      SPOTSWOOD
                           A film review by Frank Maloney
                            Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney

SPOTSWOOD is an Australian film directed by Mark Joffee, from a screenplay by Max Dann and Andrew Knight and based on their novel. It stars Anthony Hopkins, Ben Mendelsohn, Rebecca Rigg, Toni Collette, Alwyn Kurts, and Russell Crowe. Rated PG for mature humor.

SPOTSWOOD is a modest, small film with a lazy pace and one of the most acclaimed film actors of this decade, Anthony Hopkins. More importantly for me, it also featured a fresh cast of characters, especially the endearingly awkward Ben Mendelsohn and the plain and beautifully strong Toni Collette. This film will remind you of a number of others, LOCAL HERO being the most obvious. It begins like one of those whimsical comedies of postwar Britain that celebrated eccentricity and working-class virtues, this time with a lot of daffy people at a moccasin factory, schlepping around in fuzzy bedroom slippers and quilted bathrobes, a factory where the real product is a tight little family of happy people. Hopkins enters this fool's paradise (it is going broke, after all) like a serpent to help the owner save the business by destroying it, cutting out manufacturing, trimming the staff, and introducing capitalist discipline.

The opening sequence, as Hopkins and the audience explore the Balls Moccasin factory for first time and get our first incredulous ganders at its loony inmates, is very funny, very charming, and tightly paced. And then director Mark Joffee abruptly pulls the plug on his own momentum. The movie continues in this uneven way to its inevitable end. Certainly, the story holds no surprises, and the point of the film is the characters; we do learn to care about them and to see past their eccentricities. We also learn to dislike one or two of them, the ones who will never learn from this cast of industrial no-shows. Hopkins' character, Wallace, of course, is not amongst the short list of true and lasting bad-uns, and we and he have a wonderful 1/24th-scale slot-car racing sequence to thank for that.

Hopkins is a fair treat. He is more like the Hopkins of 84 CHARING CROSS ROAD than either Hannibal Lecter or Henry Wilcox of HOWARDS END, but then there's this little eye tic, this one chilly sentence, or the briefest return of a disused smile that are texts on art of small gestures and great acting.

By the way, Russell Crowe was last seen in the U.S. in the Australian film PROOF, this time playing quite a different sort of character. However, whereas PROOF came as close to being a perfect film as I've seen in a long while, SPOTSWOOD is far from perfect. It is sweet, good natured, well intended, and entertaining; what it lacks is sustained energy.

I can recommend SPOTSWOOD, but not at full price. It is receiving a somewhat wider release than a small film from Oz would normally be accorded thanks to the box-office power of Hopkins.

    --
    Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney

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