It's all going wrong down under

Making a film about bowel movements is a tough sell. But that hasn’t stopped Tony Mahony and Angus Simpson, the directorial duo behind Australian crime drama The Smuggler, who approach the topic with great vision, but a lack of even-handedness. Set against the backdrop of the 1983 America’s Cup, which saw an Australian yachting team breaking American dominance of the race, The Smuggler tells the tale of Ray Jenkins (Tony Mahony), a young man from the back end of nowhere who spends most of his time repairing televisions, being looked after by his mother, and playing football in his local amateur team. A trip to Thailand for the team is funded by shadowy small-town crime boss Pat (John Noble), and Ray is convinced to smuggle heroin back across the border in his stomach, in order to help out with his parents’ financial troubles. However, he is stopped at the last minute by customs, and detained in a hotel, where – rather than face criminal charges – he opts to try and hold his bowels for the next ten days, at the ire of police agent Croft (Hugo Weaving).

On the surface, this film all about shitting could easily turn out to be, well…shit. And the promotional material doesn’t help either – showing Mahony bending over, it seems to promise some kind of high-jinks caper centred around laxatives and defecation. But actually The Smuggler is more than that, with a variety of different moods and themes explored. At some points attempts at humour are made, but on the whole this is an incredibly bleak film, more in keeping with social realist dramas than black comedies. Ray seems a little simple, ripe for exploitation, and protests as the pellets of heroin are forced down his throat; he is regularly abused by the police chiefs in charge of him, who make him endure scalding showers; his dad, buckling under pressure, starts drinking, and verbally abuses his wife before meeting an untimely fate; his own mother tries to slip him laxatives in order to get him arrested. At times it’s unclear whether I’m watching a humorous exploration of Australian masculinity, or a Shane Meadows film.

Elsewhere, Mahony and Simpson seem to have taken a cue from David Lynch: one scene is eerily reminiscent of the famously disturbing karaoke scene in Blue Velvet, where Dean Stockwell sings along to Roy Orbison – only this time it’s crime boss Pat crooning at the funeral of Ray’s best friend, murdered by the police; elsewhere, Ray’s inner turmoil (both mental and gastrointestinal) is represented by a series of malarial fever dreams, which drip with Lynchian sweat.

Scenes like this are excellent, but the issue is that Mahony and Simpson don’t seem to know what they’re making: is it a dark satire on Australian competitiveness, with the America’s Cup serving as a metaphor for trying to keep up in a changing world? Or is it a social drama, where young men from working class towns are kept stuck in a world of petty crime and police brutality? Whatever it is, it’s certainly far from shit – with a bit more of a unified vision, Mahony and Simpson could have had an excellent film, but even though it doesn’t reach those heights, The Smuggler is far better than its base subject matter may suggest.

FINAL VERDICT: 3.5 STARS

The Smuggler is out on DVD now, and available on VOD from 29th February.