I need a drink. I’ve just seen RUBEN GUTHRIE, the film version of the sensationally successful stage play by Brendan Cowell, and I need a drink. Or do I?!
Written and directed by the playwright, RUBEN GUTHRIE comes with a triple A rating: Alcohol abuse. Australia. Advertising.
Ruben Guthrie is a campaign king, a creative with a string of Clios and super satisfied clients. The world is his oyster and he fuels that success with excess- caviar, Veuve Clicquot and cocaine.
Shitfaced on champagne, blotto on sav blanc, ripped on reds of every variety, wasted on whiskey and any other spirit you’d care to mention, Guthrie’s alcohol consumption is astonishing, but not unique.
When he nearly kills himself while under the influence and his fiancée leaves him as a result of his life threatening libations, Ruben is taken to an AA meeting by his mum. Resisting at first, suspicious of the quasi religiousity of the group confessional, but relenting after an ultimatum from his estranged girlfriend, Ruben endeavours to embrace sobriety for a year.
The conflict this quest causes is the guts of this dramatic comedy that focuses a coruscating focus on Australia’s adherence to alcohol and propensity to binge drink.
Ruben encounters hostility from friends and family who perceive a sleight to their hospitality.
The stigma of being an alcoholic has a brutal alter reflection in Australian culture –that of being branded a wowser.
There’s a chilling image in RUBEN GUTHRIE where Ruben’s mother force feeds a glass of wine into her son, his lips at bosom level, as if she is giving him suck of mother’s milk. Mother’s milk as mother’s ruin, it seems to say that booze is natural and nurtured from the womb to the tomb.
Patrick Brammal plays Ruben with the charm, confidence and grace needed to make this character someone we care about despite his flaws and foibles.
His best friend, Damian, is played by Alex Dimitriades, a flamboyant performance, complete with arrogant swagger, suspicious of his pal’s temperance, and the influence that his meetings group is having on his personality, especially Harriet Dyer as Virginia, calling her his 13th step, a crotch induced crutch to prop up his abstemiousness.
Virginia has inveigled herself into Ruben’s life and usurped his girlfriend Zoya, strikingly played by Abbey Lee, a Czech mate whose perception of Australia is that of an alcoholic country, drowning in drunkenness.
Robyn Nevin and Jack Thompson play his parents, with Jeremy Sims as Ray, Ruben’s boss at the advertising agency and Brenton Thwaites as Chet, the new wunderkind on the block, round out a top notch cast.
Cinematographer Simon Harding makes Sydney shine, like the sparkling jewel that it is, and Composer Sarah Blasko suffuses the film with a remarkable aural emotion.
We usually associate a coming of age story with teenage adolescence, but RUBEN GUTHRIE posits that “you’re never too old to try to work out who you are.” A toast to all the talent for raising the bar.
Cheers.