In Accidents Happen, writer Brian Carbee and director Andrew Lancaster build a bleakly comic narrative around the superficial bravado of language, to look at the consequences of grief. To them, death is abrupt and often embarrassing, and they certainly don’t scrimp on the body count.
In the film’s opening moments, six-year-old Billy Conway watches on as a neighbour implodes in a human fireball during a barbecue. His take-charge mother Gloria (Geena Davis) hastily arranges a family trip to the drive-in as a way to distract the boy from his trauma, but a car crash kills one child and leaves another one comatose.
Eight years on, Billy (Harrison Gilbertson) is a nervy adolescent plagued by guilt at his imagined culpability for the trio of tragedies. He keeps his own feelings under wraps, focussing instead on sparing his bristly mother any further grief.
A potty-mouthed force of nature, Gloria cuts all and sundry to the quick with her razor-sharp putdowns ('I always thought you’d grow up to be somebody"¦ I should have been more specific"). With a daughter dead, another son vegetative, and the remaining two on divergent paths to self-destruction, Gloria’s casual cruelty is easy spot by armchair psychologists the world over. The same goes for the other remnants of the shattered Conway family: husband Ray virtually burns rubber as he runs away to 'start a new wife", and rageaholic teen Larry fills the space vacated by his comatose twin with empty bottles of booze.
The trajectory of a wayward bowling ball results in yet more tragedy, but this one forces the recalcitrant Conways to clear out the 'deadwood’ (to borrow tenpin bowling parlance) and work through some of their rusted-on residual grief.
Accidents Happen is loosely based on US-born Brian Carbee’s semi-autobiographical In Search of Mike which had a successful run in various guises: as a one-man show; a multi-awardwinning short film (directed by Lancaster); and as a novel, which Carbee penned after he feared he’d been too harsh on his mother in the text’s earlier incarnations. In Search of Mike is a series of strange and surreal interspersions between a mother’s vitriol and a son’s sympathetic silence, and slabs of Gloria’s caustic dialogue in Accidents Happen are lifted directly from the film’s source text.
Accidents Happen was shot in noughties-era Sydney’s leafy lower north shore, but lead Davis and a supporting cast of mostly-Australians and Kiwis sporting passable East Coast accents, convincingly plant the film in early-80s Connecticut (Carbee cameos as a bingo caller).
Director Lancaster has cut his teeth in adland and on shorts and music videos, and this experience has made him a dab hand with the film’s big set pieces, like the crash, and its music and visuals. Co-owners of Sydney’s Supersonic music agency, Lancaster and collaborator Antony Partos confidently jolt the audience out of the period setting with electronica choices (such as Empire of the Sun’s 'Walking on a Dream’).
When the action is pared back to address the elephant in the room – Gloria’s repressed emotion over her dead and dying children – the director's lack of experience in this area shows as he crunches the gear-change, tonally. It’s left to Davis to rise above the limitations of the material, and she does so valiantly, but the scenes lack the wallop of the intended emotional payoff.
