Swinging Safari

Synopsis: Australia, summer 1975, the Gold Coast township of Nobbys Beach where 14 year-old Jeff Marsh (Atticus Robb) lives becomes a news item when a whale is stranded on its foreshore. Meanwhile Jeff’s  parents (Jeremy Sims and Asher Keddie) are in the full swing of the 1970s lifestyle revolution.  

The 1970s was the decade that defined Australia’s cultural identity as a chronically vulgar backwater with golden beaches and cloudless blue skies. “Throw another shrimp on the barbie” as Paul Hogan famously put it.  A film that makes merry with that now-distant time should be a lot of fun. Swinging Safari is some fun, but not as much as it should have been. The issue is that no matter how much the make-up, hair and wardrobe departments and set designers work to give us the right look, writer-director Elliott doesn’t have a story or characters that are strong enough to sustain our attention. Unlike Paul Hogan’s (not the same one) 1994 classic Muriel’s Wedding, Swinging Safari does not take us back to the day when every backyard had a Hills Hoist and Victa in the garden shed so much as assemble its remnants in a nostalgia-drenched diorama. Instead of characters who are living, vernacular breathing blasts from the pasts we get a clutch of modern day actors in dress-up.

A lengthy preamble introduces us to the chaotic lives of Jeff's parents, Gale and Bob, and their neighbours, Rick and Jo Jones (Julian McMahon and Radha Mitchell), and Keith and Kaye Hall (Guy Pearce and Kylie Minogue) along with their kids, all in various stages of teenagehood, with Jeff as narrator.  

In what is essentially a coming of age story, Elliott spends too little time on Jeff (and debut actor Robb needed much more help), and too much time on the largely generically-portrayed parents – the men, all Aussie blokes with their porn star facial hair and walk socks, the women with their wigs, heavy make-up and stretch pantsuits. The mugging adult cast get little opportunity to break out of this polyester strait-jacket with an odd thing being that Kylie Minogue, probably the film's biggest single drawcard, looks like someone you might see volunteering at an op-shop and has no more than a couple of lines of actual dialogue, with Elliott keeping her sidelined for most of her screen time.  Then there’s the constant hi-jinx that the kids get up to, from tormenting pets to setting themselves on fire . It all feels too undifferentiated, only coming together intermittently with the kind of visual flair of which Elliott is capable (one such scene involves Jeremy Sims and a rogue beach umbrella)  Musically too, better use could have been made of the pop hits of the day from Aussie bands like Sherbet and Hush (the Bert Kaempfert chart topper, 'A Swingin' Safari', from which the film take its name, was released in 1962, thirteen years before the film is set)

One can also question Elliott’s handling of the film’s tone. If the recurrring motif of a rotting whale carcass hardly works as a symbol for Jeff and his young friend, Melly Jones’s (Darcey Wilson) existentially-stranded condition and lends a decided pong to things, its eventual removal leads to a sequence that would be better suited to a Stephen King novel. As for the running gag about "bjs", that only serves to confirm the writer-director’s somewhat jaundiced appetite for excess.

Although Swinging Safari is based on a winning premise Elliott’s handling of it Is only so-so.

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