Exhausted the classic canon? Fed up with the current cinema of remakes, reboots and reimaginings? This week The Cold Case exhumes an early, underappreciated work by one of Australia's best-known acting exports.
Long before he voiced the rumbling Megatron in two Transformers outings, put male hair braidists back in business as Elrond in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy and tortured poor Keanu Reeves on behalf of the machines across three Matrix films, Hugo Weaving electrified discerning audiences with his breakout role in 1991's Proof, a little Australian film that was also an early calling card for a slender young chap named Russell Crowe.
Written and directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse, the movie stars Weaving as Martin, a blind man who wields his cane like a minesweeper as he hurtles around inner-city Melbourne. In a cinema that too often patronizes the visually impaired, it's a refreshing characterization; Martin doesn't trade in Pacino-esque "whoo-has" or Pride Of The Marines-style obvious self-pity. But he does take photos, utilizing the few people he trusts to describe what's in the pictures and adding labels to the prints with a Braille machine. "This is proof that what I sensed you saw, the truth," he explains to Crowe's scrappy dishwasher Andy, who becomes his trusted confidante. What will tear apart the cautious friendship is Celia, Martin's long-rebuffed housekeeper, now given to devising all sorts of minor tortures and humiliations for her employer.
Moorhouse's cinematography and sound design are exquisitely tuned to the world as a blind person might experience it. But she's also canny enough not to linger artily on a dripping tap or wall texture. Instead, Moorhouse, her leading men and Genevieve Picot (as the sympathetic but malignant Celia) gracefully and economically create complex characters in a scenario that plays out as a suspenseful but credible relationship thriller. And neatly puncturing any of the usual self-importance around a "disability" film, Moorhouse also wields a sharp and dark sense of humor; the sequence in which Martin and Andy go to a drive-in slasher film only to stir up a carload of punks and then raise the ire of cops as they flee is a near-perfect example of comic escalation.
For Weaving, then just turned 30 and yet to make the successful jump from TV and the stage to the big screen, Proof was a turning point. "I had not read a script before and immediately thought, 'That's the sort of film I want to do,'" he told me in late June in a Sydney hotel room during a press tour to promote his most recent drama, Last Ride. "I remember auditioning for Proof and thinking, 'It's my role, I know it's my role', even though there were other people going for it who I really admired."
And what was it like working with Crowe back in the day? "I was warned about Russell because a couple people I knew had run-ins with him," Weaving laughed. "They said, 'Oh, watch out, blah blah blah.' But we got on well. He was really very charming, and the thing about Russell is he works incredibly hard." Such chemistry was essential to what today would surely be termed a bromance. "Yeah, I remember at the time people talking about that kind of love affair between those two male characters, even though it wasn't voiced, and the woman in the triangle was very much someone who was repelling one and repelling the other, using them both," said Weaving. "It was a really interesting triangle, which I think's at the heart of a lot of great films, actually."
Proof arrived in the United States a few years too early to ride the mid-1990s wave of Aussie films that included Strictly Ballroom, Shine, the Moorhouse-produced Muriel's Wedding and The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert and Babe, both of which would help Weaving break out in the US. And despite scooping the Australian Film Institute awards and getting a special mention at Cannes, Weaving said he didn't really capitalize on the opportunities as much as his co-star, who was soon storming Hollywood. "I was just sort of 'What's the next acting job?' I didn't have a clue, until years later I started to realize there's a little more to this industry than that," he laughed. "Russell's much more savvy than me."
Crowe's success, though, would come back to bite Moorhouse. In 2005 production on the high-profile Eucalyptus was canceled just before cameras were set to roll. The project, which lined up Nicole Kidman and Geoffrey Rush with Crowe, collapsed due to irreconcilable differences between the director and her leading man. Who was really at fault was never made clear. "Joss is a brilliant, brilliant filmmaker," Weaving said with a weary sigh. "I hope she gets to make another movie."
Previously on The Cold Case: