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 realise 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.
