In Australian cinema quirky usually comes with a chaser of grounded reality – extended flights of fancy rarely took shape, let along get aloft. Griff the Invisible, the debut feature of writer/director Leon Ford, gently defies this standard, and dabbles contentedly in the mindset of its protagonist, a shy young man with an overly active fantasy life. It doesn’t make a lot of progress – to the point where you actually want more from the movie – but there’s enough here to suggest that Ford has a promising future, while his leading man, expatriate cable star Ryan Kwanten, has genuine versatility.
One of the interesting things about Griff the Invisible is the obvious avenues that it pays little heed to. Seen alternating, in an echo of Walter Mitty, from a withdrawn office worker into an avenging costumed crusader, Kwanten’s Griff could be the subject of a film about superhero delusions, a riff on the revisionism of Kick Ass. But the movie has no more time for that stagnant genre and its many conventions than it does for a dramatic study of how the mentally ill escape into their own world as a means of denying reality. For a good portion of the story the gravity of the expected can’t take hold.
Ford introduces Griff’s two suited worlds – dour three-piece suit by day, latex by night – but doesn’t care to distinguish what might be real, allowing the leaps in tone to unbalance you just enough that Griff’s pursuit of criminals around the streets of inner-city Sydney feels as broadly natural as his bullying in the office space by the unctuous Tony (Toby Schmitz) is squeamishly compressed. The taciturn Griff’s comfort with this dual existence becomes the norm for the audience.
That’s what attracts Melody (Maeve Dermody), who escapes the good natured but trying attention of Griff’s older brother, Tim (Patrick Brammall), to pursue what she sense is a kindred spirit. Better acclimatised to the outside world – she can talk, but not communicate, is how she puts it – Melody’s obsession with cells and molecules proves simpatico with Griff’s quest to make an invisibility suit, and she actively encourages his second life, to Tim’s scorn, because she thinks Griff should be faithful to what he sees. Kwanten has the showier role, which he handles well, but the trickier one is to identify with Griff, and Dermody does that with longing and self-identification instead of mere eccentricity.
Ultimately, Griff the Invisible is about being true to your imagination, and it retains a child-like quality that makes the M rating both somewhat harsh and counter-productive. But once it allows Griff to create his world, and Melody to validate it, the film isn’t naturally inclined to make use of the ground rules. The pacing noticeably quickens in the final act, as it tries to squeeze in some conflict into a world that’s ultimately concerned with the freedom to deviate, but the interaction between the two leads, and their characters, is so natural that you want them to go further.
Melody tells Griff that you’re literally not the same person you were as a child because every cell in your adolescent body has been replaced since then. It’s an idea true to both characters – unexpected and unconventional – but the movie itself can’t quite make the same leap of evolutionary reinvention.
