Pando's Gang - Geez, They Make You Laugh
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday July 29, 1999
TWO HANDS
Written and directed by Gregor Jordan
Rated M
Cinemas everywhere
Two Hands is a sly love letter to Sydney, a debut feature by Gregor Jordan which made me laugh more than any Australian film since Muriel's Wedding. It's as Sydney as getting your stuff pinched at Bondi Beach, a blue in the rugby league, or a Kings Cross crim in a lairy car. It's as Sydney as heroin-dealing cops, bad architecture or a headless body floating off the Gap.
Sydney has often seduced its film-makers into visual statements of the bleeding obvious: the harbour, the sunshine, the waterfront mansion locations.
Jordan achieves a better sense of place by making it more ordinary - a back alley of Darlinghurst, a faded street in the western suburbs, a bungalow clad in fake brick. He sees the humour in all of this without condescension or pretension. The comedy is affectionate and domestic, but it's not artificially heightened like, say, The Castle.
Jordan's characters are deadpan, sometimes dangerous, often thick, but they're played straight. The laughs are elaborately constructed around them in some sequences; in others, they're more organic, from a sense of who these people are. Jordan has more than one comic technique.
It's a caper movie, of sorts, but a bit more weighty than usual. Like P. J. Hogan, the director of Muriel's Wedding, Jordan mixes tragedy and comedy easily, but he adds touches of completely unexpected violence. There's more than a little Tarantino and Scorsese here, but with a 'Strayan accent and a bit less tomato sauce.
The shock value keeps us on guard, tense, and makes the film more real. People get killed, so it's not all for laughs.
Jordan's most original invention is a gang of Kings Cross ocker crims, led by Bryan Brown as a bad bastard called Pando.
Pando and his boys - Acko, Wally and Eddie, played by David Field, Tom Long and Tony Forrow - know that, in Australia, there are two kinds of Stubbies, and they like both: one in the hand, one on the tackle. The footwear budget on this picture must have been impressively low - how much do four pairs of thongs cost?
As I said, it's domestic. Pando may run heroin and kill people, but he loves talking to his little son on the phone, and he says things like: "Kids, geez, they make you laugh." His love of his son is funny, because Brown is able to be so likable on screen, even as a villain - but it's less so when the mad Acko (a rare and wholly memorable performance by David Field) runs a street kid down without a shred of regret. No-one's kids make him laugh.
Throughout most of the movie, Acko and the boys are chasing Jimmy, an 18-year-old wannabe crim (Heath Ledger, showing good comic instincts) who has lost $10,000 he was supposed to deliver for Pando. Jimmy was partly distracted by love - a pretty, blonde country girl called Alex (Rose Byrne) - but he's now in serious trouble.
We know they're going to catch him because the opening scene has Pando, Acko and the other Stubbies models dragging him out into some bushland at night for the classic "gangland-style execution".
Soon we also know there's something weird because a dead guy keeps appearing to help Jimmy, looking like one of the rotting stiffs in The Werewolves of London. This device - with Steve Vidler unrecognisable beneath putrid make-up - is the film's least successful invention. Bold, certainly, but dumb because it goes against the film's deadpan realism and adds nothing. The part has reportedly been trimmed since the film's first festival outing, but probably not by enough.
Every other (live) character pushes the film along nicely. Each is carefully drawn, distinctively cast, cleverly used.
Some are inspired, like the tattooed professional bank robber, Wozza (Steve Le Marquand), who takes Jimmy along for his first job. These two have the film's most perfectly constructed scene, a bank robbery that is hilarious and horrendous, one of those sequences (like the beanbag scene in Muriel ) which may remind you of why you love movies. pbyrnes@ibm.net
© 1999 Sydney Morning Herald
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