Movie review: The Dressmaker

Kate Winslet and Judy Davis.

Like the products of the fashion houses of Europe where the title character learned her craft, there's a good deal more style than substance in this fitfully enjoyable slice of outback Australian Gothic.

Director Moorhouse co-wrote with her husband P.J. Hogan, the brains behind the lean, sleek Muriel's Wedding, but this effort seems tone-deaf by comparison. The finished film is like the result of Ronald Hugh Morrieson and Sergio Leone writing a panto while stoned, and it has such a short attention span, it's remarkable that it (sort of) hangs together as a story.

Myrtle - "call me Tilly" - Dunnage (Winslet) returns from Europe to the fictional Dungatar, Victoria, swathed in haute couture and dropping names like Dior and Balenciaga.

We soon learn that she grew up here and was banished after Something Terrible Happened.

Tilly takes up residence in "the big house above the tip", still occupied by her thirsty and evil-tempered mother (Davis), known to everyone as Mad Molly, who veers between not recognising Tilly and blaming her for The Bad Thing.

The business of the film is to show Tilly trying to find out what that thing was and exacting revenge on everyone, in particular Beulah Harridiene (Fox), the shrewish spinster schoolteacher, who conspired against her.

Adapting Rosalie Ham's 2000 novel, Moorhouse and Hogan have created a series of moving cinematic tableaux which are often eye-poppingly striking, but it's an annoying film to watch because no scene gets the chance to breathe before we're dragged away from it.

Tonally, it makes for a hell of a mess: there's a duel between seamstresses and a long lead-up to what looks like a screechingly unlikely happy-ever-after ending involving the hunky Hemsworth but the film, which is too long by at least 20 minutes, has much more in store as skeletons tumble out of pretty much every closet in town.

It's full of pleasurable aspects: David Hirschfelder's busy score is a treat; Weaving as a cross-dressing cop has a good time and, as a result, so do we; and Winslet nails the upper-crust Aussie accent dead centre.

But she's miscast, really, and not just because she's too old for the chronology to add up.

A femme this fatale needs to have an air of mystery about her, but Winslet shows us too much, literally and emotionally. Like the film, she's full of big gestures, but never manages a grand one.

The Dressmaker

Cast: Kate Winslet, Judy Davis, Hugo Weaving, Liam Hemsworth
Director: Jocelyn Moorhouse
Running time: 119 mins
Rating: M (violence, sexual references, offensive language)
Verdict: Tone-deaf melodrama