I caught up with this Australian TV piece some 4 years late, and of course much has changed on the Australian political scene in 4 years (not that I'm claiming an excess of knowledge in the first place.) And Stiff is a very Australian piece; it doesn't travel well. I haven't read the book, and I appreciate that it's very local to its roots, NSW and in particular the Melbourne Labor Party, so perhaps a critique from the other side of the Pacific Ocean is a little unfair. Still, it's out there, being offered for viewing well beyond its national origins and north of the equator, so I feel justified in commenting.
This is a rather strange film; it can't quite decide what it is and neither can I. A political satire? Probably too laconic. A slapstick comedy? Well not quite, although it has its moments. A black comedy? No, not dark enough. I watched it twice, ransacking my mind to try and pinpoint what it reminded me of, and then it came to me. Minder, a classic British TV show of the late 70's through into the 80's. This is Australia's belated Minder.
In Minder, Dennis Waterman played Terry McCann, a personable and almost-but-not-quite bright enough help mate for Arthur Daley, a London wheeler dealer who skirted the law in a number of entertaining dodgy deals which never quite made him the fortune he thought they would. Terry (Tel) provided the muscle to Arfur's finesse, and he ended up in a variety of perilous situations, not unlike Murray Whelan's beating in the cold store or the sinking of his car (with him still inside) while undertaking the business of his paranoid, scheming boss, politico Angelo Agnelli (Mick Molloy). Substitute state politics for dodgy deals (or are they one and the same?) and David Wenham for Dennis Waterman (they even both have reddish hair) and the similarities become obvious; all it lacked was the Cockney accents. Mind you, I don't think I ever saw our Tel drinking a latté.
A dead man turns up in the cold store of a local meat packing plant. He was Turkish, the plant has a bunch of immigrant labor which may or may not be legally employed or even exist - and the political opposition could just possibly make a meal of it, with an election approaching. Poor, beleaguered Murray Whelan (Wenham) runs the office of Agnelli and is dispatched to investigate. He gets drawn into a low key drama involving an immigrant support group, the Turkish Mafia, the Kurds and lax HSE laws while trying to deal with his own disintegrating personal life. We learn early on that poor Murray isn't getting any, and here we're not talking lattés. On the babe score, I think Terry was ahead. If I recall correctly - from 30 years distance - Terry shacked up with a succession of comely air hostesses. Murray clearly needs some lessons.
While there is a good story struggling to get out of Stiff, it never really survives the over-stated comedy. The 'putting his head through the roof' routine, the exaggeratedly long pee complete with sound effects, the manly avoidance of anything approaching a vitamin when he takes his son out for pizza, putting a broom through his kitchen ceiling, and then, the coup de grace, the roof all falling off in one go. I'm sure the crew had a blast setting that stunt up, and I'll bet it was fun to film, but in Stiff I felt we'd just left the realm of reality behind completely, and it added to my confusion as to what this movie is actually trying to say. At one point Whelan appears to walk away from the camera doing a passable imitation of Charlie Chaplin's tramp. So is this a tragi-comedy or what?
Although I did feel that at the centre David Wenham held the piece together he makes Whelan attractive in a laddishly helpless sort of way, with his slightly ill-fitting suits but cute son and DW obviously relishes playing this guy - the lesser characters are mostly stereotypes, especially the girlies. There's the motherly office manager Trish (Deborah Kennedy), who shakes her kindly head at Murray in fond exasperation when she should probably give him a swift kick and tell him to get his act together, the poor but virtuous Turkish girl whom he obviously fancies (played by a non-Turk though like another commentator on IMDb I thought this a bit of a cop-out), and then there's the pit bull (but lipstickless) wife, who is more successful than our Murray so therefore obviously a ball breaking bitch, and quite possibly a lesbian too (and he didn't spot that before they married?) Sigh
This stuff is just so passé. It was, even in 2004. Can't we move on? And whilst I'm not normally keen on overly strong doses of political correctness, tossing the planted drugs into the grocery bag of the nearest available black guy? What on earth was that about? It's a truly crass piece of racial stereotyping, unless I missed something vital? No, it's not ironic.
Also of minor irritation are the muttered thinking out loud passages, where Murray explicates the plot for us. I'm sure these are meant to be helpful and funny, but if the writing isn't good enough to allow the audience to follow the action without the hero muttering asides like "Aha! It's the Turkish Mafia!" then it needs better writing. No, I can't get too enthusiastic about Stiff. I can't pretend that David Wenham isn't pleasant to look at for extended periods of time (come to think of it, so was Dennis Waterman) and it was modestly entertaining on a night when I had little else to do, but I've seen Australian TV do better.
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