Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
In the most recent of Kate Winslet‘s seven Oscar nominated roles (Steve Jobs, 2015), she played the titular Apple co-founder’s moral compass. For her next film, The Dressmaker, she threw that compass out the window.
The Australian production, which is now streaming on Amazon Prime, premiered at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival and opened Down Under the following month, achieving the eighth-highest-grossing opening weekend in the nation’s history and earning the more nominations from that year’s Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards than any other film (in the end, Mad Max: Fury Road took home more hardware). Here in the US, the film had a tepid release this past September. Regardless, it should be a cause célèbre as the woman-directed and co-written adaptation of a woman’s novel, starring, fittingly, a woman (How to Make an American Quilt‘s Jocelyn Moorhouse, Rosalie Ham, and Winslet, respectively). Suffice it to say that the other screenwriter, Moorhouse’s husband, P.J. Hogan (Muriel’s Wedding), is a feminist.
This hype is nothing compared to what The Dressmaker deserves, not because the narrative unspools in a dignified way—the opposite is true (there is much unmistakable foreshadowing, and Winslet’s choicest lines are uttered to no one). But it provides just about the most rollicking film-going experience I’ve ever had: the plot is never-ending and you will cuss yourself silly at each preposterous new development.
Possessing nothing but her sewing skills, Myrtle “Tilly” Dunnage (Darcey Wilson, then Winslet) was cast out of her hometown (Aussie’s fictional Dungatar) when she was just a kid, following an accident that killed her classmate, Stewart Pettyman (Rory Potter). She wandered through Melbourne, London, Spain, Milan and Paris, where she was mentored by a designer. Sewing machine in tow, she resolves that she’s 25 years overdue for an unannounced homecoming. It’s now 1951, and breaks into her mother’s desert hilltop house, only to find it strewn with leaves and tin cans; creatures scamper about. The townspeople have long assumed that the elder Dunnage done for, but “Mad Molly” (Judy Davis) is still kicking, though she says she doesn’t remember her daughter (and tries to overturn her with a golf club).
Plainclothes Tilly presents herself to locals at a football game, where she begs to be welcomed back into the fold. Just kidding. She drapes herself in red—gown, gloves, heels, lips—save for raven sunglasses and cigarette-holder, a take no prisoners visage, like if Breakfast at Tiffany‘s Audrey Hepburn owned the Moulin Rouge. Once she successfully turns her dowdy former classmate, Gert (Winslet’s Steve Jobs co-star, Sarah Snook) into Emma Stone‘s ritziest doppelgänger, Tilly becomes Dungatar’s savviest entrepreneur, stitching couture for her lady neighbors, who have been treated barbarically by their husbands. For example, Marigold Pettyman (Alison Whyte)’s husband drugs and rapes her, plus cheats on her, yet still believes he occupies the the moral high ground to threatened cross-dressing “pervert” Sergeant Farrat (Hugo Weaving) with blackmail. Then there’s elderly Irma Almanac (Julia Blake)’s husband, a name-calling chemist who used to beat her; now she experiences chronic pain, but he won’t prescribe treatment, arguing, “All she needs is God’s forgiveness and a wholesome diet.” Tilly begins baking her tiny hash cakes as an alternative. Also, Mr. Almanac (Barry Otto)—who karma rewarded with a hunchback—has his wheel-chair bound wife always carry a pillow on her lap so she can bring him to a stop when he’s in perpetual motion.
To stifle Tilly’s business, Mr. Pettyman (Shane Bourne)—father of Stewart, and the aforementioned blackmailer responsible for her banishment—invites a new, less-skilled seamstress (his mistress), Una Pleasance (Sacha Horler) to set up shop in his home (so they can have sex when his wife does yardwork). Even the nicest man in their midst—Teddy McSwiney (Liam Hemsworth), who lives with his mother and mentally-challenged brother in a trailer steps from Molly’s house—has a horrific pastime that should (but doesn’t) repel Tilly. Teddy and his fellow footballers unwind by plunging into a silo and—swear to God—making snow angels in the 300 rats feeding atop the grain.
During Gert’s wedding and reception, Tilly learns some transformative facts about her life. First, on that fateful day that Stewart died, she had a witness—their teacher, Beulah Harridiene (Kerry Fox). Bribing a certain clothes-fetishizing law officer, Tilly reads Beulah’s bogus witness testimony, which states that the she struck her classmate with a brick before stomping on his skull. Actually, Stewart had his own horrific pastime: he enjoyed knocking the wind out of people by charging bull-like at their stomaches. Tilly was his next victim, but she smartly scooted out of the way, and Stewart hit his head against a brick wall and went out to pasture. If that wasn’t enough, Tilly learns that Stewart was actually her half-brother, making sexual predator Mr. Pettyman her father. Teddy comforts Tilly (he won her over by making a “mirror tree”—an assemblage of mirrors, outside, supported by branches—where her customers can admire themselves). They finally sleep together, and also decide to get married and run away. We’re at just past the 80 minute mark, and here’s where the movie should end, entering cinematic history as simply a strange time with killer costumes. Yet one-third of the script remains. Prepare to be obliterated.
Teddy and Tilly stargaze atop the silo, and he elects to drop in on Remy, Templeton, Petter Pettigrew, and their cousins. Though this time, he jumps down and never resurfaces. Instead of landing on the usual cushion of dense wheat, Teddy sinks through the sorghum and suffocates. Let me rephrase: Kate Winslet’s onscreen—and Miley Cyrus’s actual—fiancé fatally asphyxiates in what will eventually become syrup. “Cursed” Tilly is again scorned throughout the land. However, Molly puts a secret plan into motion just before keeling over in a Tilly-made suit (an event witnessed by her absent co-parent, Mr. Pettyman, who does nothing, same as Mr. Almanac, who could attempt to revive her but objects). Drunk after Molly’s funeral, Tilly unknowingly throws a record player at Beulah, who is spying through the window; Beulah is soon committed to a sanatorium. Next, Tilly tells her secret stepmother, Marigold, everything, from how her husband assaults her to how her son died (incidentally, Tilly once told Molly that’s she’d lost a child, the one narrative thread never revisited). When Mr. Pettyman returns home, his wife slices him across the calf with a kitchen knife, letting him slowly bleed out on her once-pristine floors. Elsewhere, Mr. Almanac is desperately in need of Erma’s pillow to slow his trajectory, but since she’s in a stoned slumber (which blameless Farrat takes credit for), he careens through the Pettyman’s home, only to be snuffed out by a muddy pond. Finally, after Farrat’s arrest, as all of Dungatar and Winyerp are staging rival plays at the theater—consider them the Pawnee and Eagleton of Southern Australia—Tilly sloshes gasoline throughout Molly’s house, cascades a comically-long fabric bolt down the hill, and saunters off, flicking her cigarette behind her. The house explodes, fire twirls south, and the citizens of Dungatar arrive just in time to watch the town torch. Tilly is safely ensconced in a train car, charting a course to Paris.
Body count: five confirmed dead, four of them male. Talk about toppling the patriarchy.
