Review – Cloudstreet

Cloudstreet – Showcase – 8:30pm Sunday – AUS

It’s taken two years and ten million dollars but Showcase’s big Australian mini-series Cloudstreet has finally arrived on our screens. Taking a leaf from HBO’s book the FOXTEL channel has decided to invest a lot of cash in an intelligent adult drama in an effort to attract more subscribers. Having already brought us Love My Way, Satisfaction and Tangle, Showcase has thrown a lot more cash on the table this time around in an effort to bring Tim Winton’s novel to life. The best part about a mini-series based on Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet? You don’t have to put up with reading Tim Winton’s wanky prose in order to enjoy it.

I’ve never read all of Cloudstreet despite it sitting on our bookshelf for a couple of years. Every time I picked it up and read that first chapter I tossed it back down. Eventually I gave up even bothering to read the book, instead bringing it out just to mock how much of wanker Tim Winton is. No, it’s not because he’s a grown man who has a ponytail, nor is it because we were forced to read the horrible Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo in year seven. It’s simply because Tim Winton uses three words when one word would do, and when he chooses to just use one word it’s always the most obnoxious word he can find.

The novel Cloudstreet opens with the following paragraph:

Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living. Yachts run before an unfelt gust with bagnecked pelicans riding above them, the city their twitching backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the water’s edge.

Why does he describe them as ‘bagnecked’ pelicans? What other way could you picture a pelican? As a flatnecked pelican?

It’s not just ‘sunshine’, and it’s not just ‘dreamy sunshine’, it’s ‘dreamy briny sunshine’.

‘The whole restless mob of us’… of course he’d use the word ‘mob’, he’s Tim Winton.

Unfortunately Cloudstreet isn’t completely free of Tim Winton’s text. There’s a storybook-voiced narrator who pops up every so often as if to read directly from the book, and Winton’s chapter titles pop up on screen as well, and naturally they’re titles like ‘The Shifty Shadow Is Lurking’, because this is still Tim Winton we’re talking about.

My personal issues with Tim Winton aside, I was really looking forward to Showcase’s lavish production of his novel. It wasn’t just going to have a few truckloads of cash and the complete support of a network behind it, it was filled with a great Australian cast and it was being helmed by Matthew Seville who directed my favourite Australian film Noise. Yes, Cloudstreet does look fantastic, and the cast all do solid work, but I’m not completely convinced it’s that good of a series, and I’m certainly not blown away by it.

Cloudstreet follows the lives of two Perth families from 1943 to 1963. The Pickles family, with gambling addict dad Sam (Stephen Curry), drunk mum Dolly (Essie Davis), and their three kids, Rose, Ted and Chub. The other family are the god-fearing, all-singing, Lamb family who have been left homeless after a fire. There’s dopey but good natured dad Lester (Geoff Morrell), strong mum Oriel (Kerry Fox), and a whole bunch of kids including Fish (Tom Russell in the first part) who gets brain damage after nearly drowning, and the eldest son Quick (Callan McAuliffe) who pins horrible photos from the war on his wall.

There are some really strong performers in this cast, in particular Curry as Sam who’s always believes his luck will change, and Geoff Morrell who’s great as Lester. I found Kerry Fox’s performance to sit on the border between really powerful and really laughable. There are a lot of fair dinkum Australianisms in the dialogue and coming from Fox’s mouth is when they sounded the clumsiest. Essie Davis is good as a woman who’s sick of her husband, and sick of her life, but even she’s forced to say lines like “You let these wowsers in Sam Pickles!” Tom Russell is good as the young Fish, while Quick and Rose mostly just get to stare mournfully into the half distance. As for the rest of the kids, if you asked me I couldn’t pick them out of a line-up, they all just blend together. There’s a half dozen of them, one’s fat and there’s a red-headed girl, and some others that all look the same and haven’t yet been given anything closely resembling a distinctive personality, hopefully that changes as they get older.

Throw a stone and you’ll find another critic who will collapse at Cloudstreet’s feet and call it ‘Outstanding’, or scream its name from the rooftops and describe it as ‘world class’, so I’m well aware I’ll be in the minority for saying that I was underwhelmed with this series. For fans of the novel I can see how thrilled they’d be to see their beloved story brought so carefully to life, but personally I didn’t really see the point. Having not read the novel I don’t know where this is headed, and based on what I’ve seen so far I’m not sure I care where this is headed.

Is this about these two families and how they cope with the hard times and the good? Or is it about the house? Because there are more than a few moments where the house becomes some sort of Amityville Horror creature that moans and groans and has creepy rooms the kids don’t want to go near. There’s even a wise old Aboriginal man who quite seriously says ‘don’t go near that place – ever!’ like he’s in the opening scene of Friday The 13^th. The series also veers wildly in tone, for the first part it felt like a fairly honest look at life in wartime Perth, but then the second part introduced a talking pig and a boat ride through the stars and I didn’t know what to think. There was even a galah that crapped out money.

I can cope with a galah that shits coins, not sure if I’m buying a galah that shits a whole piggybank’s worth of coins, but I can cope with it. It’s a bit of quirk. However, I don’t understand what a talking pig has to do with anything. Does this reimagining of Babe actually talk? Or is it just in Fish’s imagination? And if it is just in Fish’s imagination, why does it seem like Lester can hear the pig too? I can handle ambiguity, but I can’t handle when the otherwise normal drama I’ve been watching for the last HOUR suddenly introduces a talking pig for no reason whatsoever, outside of ‘it was in the novel, so we need to include it in the mini-series’, which seems to be the same reason they use chapter titles throughout the episodes, despite the fact this is a television program and not a book. (Although, in the series’ defence I’m going to assume those chapter titles are there to indicate the passing of time without needing to plonk a ‘2 years later’ sticker on the bottom of the screen.)

This is one of the best Australian dramas we’ll see this year, the other being Paper Giants (and isn’t it incredibly disappointing that both of those are just mini-series), but I’m not going to kick down your door and scream at you until you watch it. If you love Tim Winton’s novel presumably you’ll love this. I’m not a fan of the book, obviously, but I am a fan of television drama and while I applaud Showcase’s commitment to bring Australian stories to the screen in a HBO fashion, I don’t believe this reaches the heights that television drama has risen to in the last five years. Is it better than Cops L.A.C and Sea Patrol? You bet it is, but is it better than Mad Men or Deadwood? Not by a long shot. Cloudstreet is a solid effort, but it’s not as remarkable as it’s quickly formed reputation suggests.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Alright