BABYTEETH
M, 118 minutes, now showing
★★★★
In the narrative arts, no talent is more highly prized than the ability to pump new life into a cliché.
It’s especially so these days when stories are being swallowed up, regurgitated and re-mixed faster than ever before.
But clichés are clichés because they embody enduring truths. A prime example is the plight of Romeo and Juliet. Its central premise was a cliché long before Shakespeare brought his gifts to it and it’s still being re-tooled because it still speaks to us.
Eliza Scanlen and Toby Wallace in Babyteeth. Credit:Lisa Tomasetti
Babyteeth is yet another version – one that confirms a good cliché’s capacity to span the globe. It’s set among the overarching eucalypts and Pettit + Sevitt designs of the seemingly tranquil Sydney suburb of St Ives, where the Finlay family are feeling anything but serene.
Fifteen year-old Milla Finlay (Eliza Scanlen) has cancer. In the film’s opening scene, she’s gathering the resolve to throw herself under a train when she’s knocked sideways – in every sense – by Moses (Toby Wallace), a tattooed rebel further decorated by a mullet with rats’ tails.
When they pick themselves up, he tells her how much he likes the colour of her hair before chivalrously mopping up her nosebleed with his shirt. She’s won and more importantly, so is he. They become a pair even though he’s eight years older and is homeless because his mother calls the police whenever she sees him.
Eliza Scanlen and Toby Wallace breathe new life into a timeless story.
It’s a set-up that lends itself to lavish helpings of schmaltz but Rita Kalnejais’s screenplay, drawn from her own play, takes a cooler line. The Finlays may be distraught, but frequent black comic eruptions expunge traces of sentimentality from their behaviour towards one another.
Milla’s father, Henry (Ben Mendelsohn) is a psychiatrist and he and her mother, Anna (Essie Davis) are sustaining their sex life with Tuesday afternoon appointments on the desk in his consulting room. He’s also helping Anna get through her desperate days and insomniac nights by dispensing generous doses of anti-depressants. Before Milla’s illness, she was already battling frustration over sacrificing her career as a concert pianist for motherhood. Now she’s close to sinking.
It sounds like grim stuff but Shannon Murphy’s direction keeps up the antic spirit with a jagged rhythm that mirrors the unpredictable state of mind at chez Finlay. You don’t know what these characters are going to do next. Even more engaging is the fact they don’t either. They’re playing it by ear and Anna’s ear, so acute when it comes to music, has gone to tin when it comes to those dearest to her.
For Milla, Moses is a pure jolt of adrenalin. He embodies the concept of possibility. Their meeting has shown her anything can happen and life can change course, after all. It’s a revelation Scanlen (Little Women) conveys with sweetness and steel in equal quantities. She loves her parents but she’s wise to them and their neuroses. In many ways, she’s more mature than they are and now she has a reason to live, she’s making sure they allow her to embrace it.
It’s a scenario fraught with exaggerations. First up, to make it work, we have to like Moses, which is surprisingly easy to do because Wallace gives him a guileless curiosity and willingness to please. Although he’s lost control of his life he hasn’t entirely surrendered the hope of getting it back. He’s an optimist and Milla is benefiting from his optimism’s reflected glow.
On the downside, he also deals drugs to get by. But Henry is hardly in a position to condemn him for that since he’s grappling with similar shortcomings of his own. Mendelsohn’s performance has none of the implacability of the villains who have built his reputation internationally. Henry’s flaws are forged by anguish. He is doing his best amid the chaos – as is Anna. She’s the most erratic of the bunch and Davis infuses her with a mordant melancholy energised now and again with a totally unexpected burst of unreasoning joy.
It has great vitality for a film about the shadow of death. But it’s not really about death. It’s about the art of freshening up the familiar by giving it a new aspect. It’s about life in all its tantalising messiness.
Sandra Hall is a film critic for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
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