a few thoughts on Bastard Boys
The real Greg Combet and the never unreal Sue Smith on location
I’ve just been enthralled by Bastard Boys for the past two nights, and I think it is a very important piece of television.
Sue Smith, the writer is a pretty major part of our literary culture, unnoticed only because she writes for the screen. The Brides of Christ, The Leaving of Liverpool, The Road from Corrain and Peaches all flowed from her words. She has also been an executive producer on a raft of productions, and worked on series as well.
I admire the way the language in this was so pungent, while it found the idioms and rhythms of the characters. It is easy to do working class hero, not so simple to find the passion in our financial and legal aristocrats.
The structure seemed pretty fabulous. In this kind of intercutting it is too easy to wreck the emotions of a strand but this built and relaxed impeccably. The decision to anchor each part on a different central character was clever and energised the story – and allowed the central ironies to play out effectively.
At the same time, there are a few soapy moments, and a few obvious tropes from popular television, that emphasise the decision to make a broad program with wide appeal. People keep telling each other how scared they are, we hammer the bits about resisting the urge to violence, Corrigan’s home is too glacial, we were trapped in a slow end where the McSwain’s love for each other is played out in a whole lot of sighing..
Mind you, I did like Anthony Hayes performance, along with Justine Clark. Jack Thompson, shorn of that boomy, stagey voice of his, was terrific, all bull-necked age and baffled, joyous reflexes.
Indeed, there is a general tension about stiff people that flows through the project. Combet, Corrigan, Burnside – they are all nerds. I forgave Combet, even though he seemed a bit juvenile at times. I loved the reptilian patience and jerky twisting that Geoff Morell brought to the Corrigan part, creating a sense of tragic isolation and self-sufficiency which grew more and more enticing. But Burnside was just a parody, and somehow never found the patrician zeal we can hear in his public speeches and flights of disciplined anger.
A lot of this comes from the attempt to build the characters, to let them grow – which is done by diminishing them at the beginning. A trick which the Americans somehow never need.
I can well imagine the first meetings over the script. How would they cover the vast sweep of the story, on so many docks in so many places, with so many massed people? They must have despaired over the fact that this is such a boysey story, in this day and age. The program never managed to put the women centre stage, and left us with a heap of scenes when the girls looked adoringly at their men and nodded encouragement. While the men agonised over missing their kids.
The sweep is an important issue. For probably five years a Melbourne team has tried to get a documentary made about the story. There is a lot of footage shot during the pickets using home video cameras. The documentary has never been made – I think it is an ironic display of fearfulness while the ABC was preparing to be brave with a four hour drama. But while the series used the actuality of news broadcasts, it never incorporated any of this wider footage, which must have contained the scope and size of the confrontation. We never even saw anyone on the wharf with a camera, which is almost a kind of guilty admission.
I got a bit sick of the look of the series. Was there some kind of electricity shortage? Do unionists have a secret passion for domestic gloom? There was a weird sense of The Sullivans in a lot of those households, with a hint of Forties furniture in houses that were probably really furnished with tatty IKEA knockoffs.
The music was fantastic, and carried us through some thin bits where the lack of extras and wide shots was a bit close to being obvious. The cranes helped too – whenever we needed a sense of scale, we cut to a giant steel thing rolling past the stacked containers.
I presume the interviews to camera were designed to show that the series was based on research. They didn’t work for me at all, and the actors seemed uncomfortable doing them. They have no motivation in the central conflicts, and are hard to perform. Drama is about combat, and this is just pseudo-reflection.
I am sure the government is having conniption fits about the fact that Greg Combet is the hero. The credits say he is running the ACTU, but he isn’t any more, and I guess that gave a few clever spin doctors in the ABC a few palpitations. Corrigan emerges as weirdly attractive too, in a cold, cold way. He is very endearing by the end. But the government doesn’t care about Corrigan. The charges against the Howard government stand; but we should also remember that the charges laid against the Union movement were ultimately prosecuted in this drama with some brutality.
The Union is seen to defend rorting and rip-offs, and their resistance to reform led to the whole nightmare. Combet is allowed to tell Coombs the reforms should have occured years ago. At the end of the day, the heroism is misplaced, and shoving the workers out is the best thing to do.
There is a moment when Corrigan asks Combet what he would do in his position. Combet snarls that he would never be in his position. But Combet is probably soon to be a minister in a federal Labor government, in a country adapting to change, which could easily crash badly. What then?
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Corrigan sent an email to Glenn Dyer at Crikey which said:
“The producers originally told me they weren’t making a boring tale of class warfare but the production serves it up in spades.
The program portrays a series of predictable stereotypes and silly caricatures and gives them real names then cleverly claims to be a drama and hence does not explore any inconvenient truths such as the impact of the waterfront rorts on ordinary Australians.I will be surprised if anyone other than welded on members of the industrial left can survive four hours of this tedium.”
He is a charmer, isn’t he?
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Chris Sheil has a lovely post and thread about this over on Club Troppo.
May 15th, 2007 at 9:02 am
giant steel thing”, its called a straddle.
Your critique on the drama is excellent.
I disagree about the notion that the union were luddites about reform.
‘Overmanning’ and high penalty rates were related to the episodic nature of ship arrival at the wharf, casual unaligned workforces, weak safety management and reluctance to renew strategic business plans or negotiate by management.
The unions negotiated away these ‘rorts’ in return for income levelling, job and wage guarantees with few regrets.
A genuine barrier to reform was the decrepit infrastructure on wharves and has been an ongoing issue for a hundred years in Victoria, both governments and stevedoring companies avoiding any real commitment to wharf and port infrastructure .
Having a monopoly on the few metres of wharfage available, there was not much incentive for action until the growth of logistics companies with enough clout to pose a threat to the established stevedoring companies, and frustrated by inefficiencies foisted on them at the wharves.
However, restructuring managements, overhauling businesses and mplementing IT strategies, is long term and problematic stuff.
Share prices often can go down, necessary though the reforms may be.
The dressing up of Patrick with a new workforce must have seemed a no-brainer at the time. A share price winner.
Anyway the union is still there and it is Corrigan who has gone.
One thing about this series it captured the atmosphere at the wharves exactly, bringing back many vivid memories.
May 15th, 2007 at 11:04 am
[...] It’s a rude shock returning to editing Missing Link, despite Helen Dale’s more-than-able stewardship. In fact it was such a shock that I was easily diverted into watching the second half of Bastard Boys on ABC TV last night, in lieu of my editing duties. I’m glad that I had so little self-discipline because it was superb and not-to-be missed viewing. I was almost persuaded out of watching by a negative review by Michael Duffy in the SMH. Duffy claimed a left wing bias in the docu-drama that simply didn’t exist. He reckoned Combet, Coombs and lawyer Josh Bornstein were cardboard cutout heroes, whereas Corrigan was portrayed as a cold, calculating villain. Nothing could have been further from the truth. There were certainly stereotypical aspects to the portrayals of Coombs and Combet IMO, but Geoff Morrell’s portrayal of Chris Corrigan was superb. Here was a proud, warm, humorous if tightly-buttoned and ruthlessly determined man, every bit as courageous and principled in his own way as any of the trade union heroes. Apart from Christopher Sheil’s review here at Troppo, Melaleuca and David Tiley also review Bastard Boys. One of the finest Australian TV docu-dramas I’ve seen, that’s my verdict. It captured the complexity of the situation, dramatised it convincingly and satisfyingly and avoided bias to the extent any artistic work could ever achieve. [...]
May 15th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Phrog – I love getting comments from people who know what they are talking about; it is one of truly great things about the internet.
What you have to say, of course, is a worry. There is a level in which drama is a cartoon in relation to ideas, and this series ends up insisting several times that the union is anti-reform and focuses on rorts to imply they are at the centre of the problem. We never, for instance, hear anyone put the $90,000 through conned overtime issue into the context of total costs and inefficiencies as you have just done.
Whereas this kind of “bash the worker” “structural reforms” is just ideologically driven nastiness, a first reflex that both papers over the real problems and makes them impossible to solve.
I’ve spent most of my working life in contact with programs in which people are simultaneously asked to take cuts and make creative changes. Sometimes it works, but its hell to live through.
May 15th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Good review, David. The ‘interview’ bits didn’t work for me, either. My response was, is this a doco or a tele-movie?
My partner and I were at Swanston docks as part of the community picket (at different times, we weren’t together yet, then) and each of us recognised in the movie and remembered different aspects of what it was like being there. To me what was missing in the movie was that mix of boredom and constant tension that something was going to happen (but didn’t), but mainly the role of other unions, and the Victorian Trades Hall Council overall, in keeping the community pickets going and supporting the campaign. I guess you can’t make drama out of the boring bits.
While the movie was basically about the MUA’s experience of the dispute, for many non-MUA members the key experience was about the whole union movement and the community groups and lefties from all around coming together – behind the MUA and against the attack on unionists.
The closest you got to that in the movie was cliched scenes of forrest/environment activists sharing experiences with unionists. And the CFMEU members turning up en mass at the crucial point. I realise the question is about whose story this is, but I can’t help thinking of your earlier posts about Australian film, and the significance of the audience recognising something of themselves, their places and their history in the stories on screen.
BTW, Combet has not stepped down from being ACTU secretary. He is still running the ACTU’s anti-WorkChoices campaign right up to the election. The ABC reported that “Mr Combet will be staying on as the ACTU secretary until polling day.” His decision, I’m sure, gave a whole lot of Union hopefuls a lot of grief.
The ABC arts blog has an interesting run down on the ABC bias line, including comments by Sue Smith.
May 15th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Interesting to read the various comments on Catallaxy about Bastard Boys. including the people defending the lump system on the wharves.
I just never get confident assertions that human suffering is right and necessary. And to me it is a fundamental premiss of human culture that the parties to a relationship must both have power. At least to appeal equally to some system of arbitration.
The screen industry is such a paradigm of this at the moment. Producers hire from a freelance market which has some characteristics of the lump labour system. The contractees are afraid, and a lot of bad things happen.
I can’t tell you how horrible the insecurity can be.
But the producers themselves live in their version of the lump system – they offer projects which are bought and sold in a precarious marketplace in which they seek certainty and logic.
And both the producers and the other guilds have been good at combining to serve their common interests in the system, by politicking together.
.
May 16th, 2007 at 1:35 am
Thx for the review David. I enjoyed it. I think it’s quite clear that the face to camera bits didn’t work, but it’s interesting to wonder why. One of the things it makes me think is why can’t actors play something as straight at that. The funny thing about actors is that they find it very hard to actually act realistically. Like newsreaders – they have their genre and – oddly enough there are very few who can stretch to straight dead pan realism. If they could do that – or at least if they did it often, I expect they’d not be regarded as good actors – just as newsreaders wouldn’t be regarded as much chop if they just chatted to the camera clear and easy to understand but not with that parody of a greek chorus which is their sing-song delivery. We want more buzz out of our actors. It’s definitely a limitation in some regards. But interesting to think about don’t you think?
May 16th, 2007 at 11:38 am
Oh yes. Working to camera is not the same as acting at all. Performance is about an external focus on conflict and motivation, which is why pickup shots have to be done to some kind of foil. The generosity of actors can be measured by their willingness to put in an off-camera performance for the central actor to respond to – schedule allowing.
Actors occasionally talk about the horrors of acting to a ball on a stick.
I’ve recently had the chance to see a heap of C31 community TV shows, which are driven by presenters. Most are hopeless, and there is no sense of relationship through the camera, so people seem to be talking to themselves. But a few reached out through the lens, and you know instantly they should be given a professional job.
Not many actors manage that other kind of relationship. It is why people like Eddie McGuire and Rove McManus are so valuable. And why Noni Hazlehurst is effective, or Maggie Tabbberer.
Or why Play School is a tough gig. And works for some people.
There is a special problem with documentary. Transcripts are very difficult to work with because they are so idiomatic and fit the rhythm of someone’s intonations so closely. But if you don’t work idiomatically in the fake interview form, then audiences pick it instantly. It is by nature informal.
I’ve worked on programs where actors have to read historical texts, which is a special case. Solved by either getting the actor to do something in relation to the text like rewrite it, or rehearse a speech or whatever, or by getting them to interact with the final recipient of the letter. It can be better just to do these as voice overs of either writer or recipient.
Don Parham’s documentary Riot or Revolution, (worth a look if you get the chance) is a good example. That was even worse because it recreated actual speeches, which really do need to be done extremely naturalistically.
May 16th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Yes, but it’s odd isn’t it. You’d think that acting naturalistically would be a walk in the park for many people but certainly an actor. Certainly it’s behind the success of lots of films that take pretty unknown actors or even people who are not actors at all and tell them to act naturalistically. I think there was a mini-series on the UK General Strike in (was it?) 1926 which got lots of plaudits for its naturalism. You really couldn’t tell whether what you were looking at was drama or documentary – ie the scenes were that naturalisitc. Now there is just no reason why an actor can’t learn to act like that if that is required – and it was required for the face to camera shots and they fluffed it. I guess the person responsible is the director isn’t it. Shouldn’t he/she have rejected the acting that was being served up. I don’t believe for a minute that the actors couldn’t have done it more naturalistically if they were given more guidance – they were damn good actors most of them as we saw in the dramatic scenes.
May 16th, 2007 at 8:18 pm
Brilliant “review”, David.
Have, as just a normal, garden variety bloke who just watches TV, been trying figure out how I could say – Australian TV has finally “come of age” with “Bastard Boys” .. subtle nuance in script, powerful performances, rich depth with sets and lighting – but don’t have the inside knowledge or expertise with words. Was “up country” when all that was happening on the docks. Heard about it, of course, filtered dimly through whatever media was available .. but never really knew – or understood – the detail … and yer, am well aware that is a “reconstruction”. Must, now, buy the book.
May 18th, 2007 at 6:08 am
Lament for my identity in iambic pentameter.
O ye cruel fate that I am born
To share a name with such a man as this
Whose constant perturbation at the truth
Competes with my own Google ranking.
May 21st, 2007 at 9:39 pm
Barista:
Excellent, thought-provoking post.
Now that the ABC has relinquished its position as a voice of Australia and reverted to its old “Menzies mouthpiece” role, those people in Melbourne who want to make a documentary about the Waterfront Dispute might be better going to New Zealand or to France. [It's happened. Here I am actually advocating that Australian talent go off-shore .... things must be bad
]