SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL: The Sydney Film Festival program notes tout David Caesar’s Prime Mover as a “diesel-charged romance” that burns a lot of emotional rubber and is visually playful.

Alas, after the world premiere, the puns that sprang to my mind were far less flattering: maybe running on empty, or road trip to nowhere in particular. To continue with the bad analogies, this film rarely gets out of second gear as a love story, comedy or drama.   

Introducing the movie at the State Theatre, writer-director Caesar described it as a “long labour of love of mine.”  I’m not sure why he was so passionate about this straight-forward, cliché-riddled tale. It’s clear he harbours a lot of affection for his lead characters but none is particularly interesting, distinctive or compelling.

Michael Dorman plays Thomas, who works as a mechanic at a Dubbo truck depot while he dreams of owning and driving his own rig. His father dies in an accident at the depot, which stuns Thomas to the extent that he asks his mother the next day, “Where’s dad”?   Thomas gets to realize his dream after borrowing $240,000 from a shady woman to buy a rig—a plot device which telegraphs there’ll be a lot of obstacles and trouble down the road.

He seems not to grieve his father’s loss for long, as in no time he’s chatting up Melissa (Emily Barclay), the pretty girl who works at a roadhouse. They barely get to know each other before they’re rolling around on the floor, she falls pregnant just as her deadbeat mother had predicted, and he asks her to marry him.

From here, Ceasar relies on the usual clichés of the road movie genre to propel the narrative: long hours at the wheel, popping pills to stay awake, cut-throat competition, a kindly mentor in fellow truckie Phil (William McInnes), and a sleazy character named Johnnie (Ben Mendelsohn). Added to the mix is the familiar situation of Melissa having trouble coping with the baby, which is no surprise after Tom curiously decides they should live in a caravan in the middle of nowhere.

The climax, when it finally arrives, is utterly predicable yet makes little sense. Re-uniting after co-starring in Paul Goldman’s vastly superior Suburban Mayhem, Dorman and Barclay struggle to bring any nuances to their stereotypical characters, and their romance lacks heat. McInnes and Mendelsohn are no more than serviceable, given the paucity of material they had to work with. Underbelly’s Gyton Grantley is terrific in an all-too-brief cameo as a vicious repo man. The level of violence struck me as gratuitous, not least the night scene where Tom and Phil club to death some sheep that were injured when the truck ran over them.

This is a disappointing effort from Caesar, who showed much more guile and story-telling flair with his previous films Mullet, Dirty Deeds and Idiot Box. There are some nice flourishes when inanimate objects, like a calendar featuring Melissa and a St. Christopher medallion, become animated. But the sequences when Mel and St Christopher are conjured up out of Tom’s addled imagination merely seem pretentious. And a recurring image of a giant spanner is mystifying. 

With the exception of 2002’s Dirty Deeds, a period Sydney crime flick, Australian filmmaker David Caesar has built a body of work focused on the Australian working class. His constituency is the tradie and the local dickhead, the petty crim and single mum, the larrikin and the quiet neighbour – at times it’s as if he picked up where Cold Chisel’s Don Walker left off.

But unlike a Mike Leigh he doesn’t have an ideological or stylistic barrow to push; like his protagonists he’s suspicious of causes. So 1992’s Greenkeeping was wryly eccentric, 1996’s Idiot Box – his standout feature to date – was a blistering inhabitation of generational malaise, and 2001’s Mullet was a droll exploration of small town life and the inscrutability of fish.

Prime Mover, his first feature in seven years after a steady roster of directing for television, is a romance of sorts – mainly between a man and his truck, but with a wife and baby also present. The milieu is the transport hubs of regional New South Wales, on the long roads wending off Dubbo and literally the back of Bourke, and it comes with the kind of dry humour Caesar’s character’s bring to acrid life. “She had to have her foot amputated,” explains one in regards to a family member’s absence. “The smokes.”

It is as much an exercise in mood as storytelling. Events certainly unfold, but they do so with a curious, disconnected air that sometimes rankles. It’s a mood set by the movie’s protagonist, Thomas (Michael Dorman), an amiable young man whose dream is to be the owner/operator of his own semi-trailer. Even when he initiates something in his life, such as a relationship with service station clerk Melissa (Emily Barclay), he soon becomes reactive, happy to smooth down the edges without really noticing any problems.

With his father (Andrew S. Gilbert) recently deceased in a workplace accident, Thomas latches on to his trucking dream, even though he has to borrow from a small town loan shark. Misfortune looms, but Caesar is more interested in the character’s internal life than his external difficulties. Gypsy music and that discombobulated air of nineties Balkans cinema are worked into the narrative, and at one stage a disconsolate Melissa sits on the step of the family caravan, accordion in hand, and delivers a doleful take on Hunters & Collectors 'Stuck on You'.

Caesar doesn’t sit still for long. Dirty Deeds, for example, was shot through with showy camera moves and editing effects that couldn’t mask a torpid pace, so here religious icons and calendars come to life and there’s a suggestion that Thomas’ obsession with his truck is on a par with Stephen King’s tale of automotive obsession, Christine. But his avoidance of the real world, which grows steadily in duress as his wife succumbs to post-natal depression and his friend Johnnie (Ben Mendelsohn) is revealed as a Mephistophelean figure, makes Thomas a somewhat despicable dreamer. But Caesar is intent on redeeming him – the fantasy wouldn’t work otherwise – and thus isn’t alert to the damage wrought by his failings.

It would also take an exceptional actor to pull it off and, as yet, Michael Dorman’s everyday charm can’t fully inspire you to take the journey with Thomas. His best scenes are with Barclay – the two previously played a very different couple in 2006’s Suburban Mayhem – and her Melissa reflects something in her husband that the movie needs. As it is it’s another left turn from David Caesar, flawed but nonetheless tuned to an idiosyncratic pitch.

* * 1/2