Film Review: Palm Beach (Director: Rachel Ward)

Palm Beach is an unchallenging and pleasantly distracting Australian take on dining-table dramedies, providing just under 100 minutes of low-stakes entertainment through its playfully comedic cast of veteran actors.

Starring: Sam Neill, Greta Scacchi, Bryan Brown, Matilda Brown, Richard E. Grant, Jacqueline McKenzie, Heather Mitchell, Aaron Jeffery

Palm Beach centres around a group of lifelong friends and fading creatives, gathering to celebrate the birthday of 70-something Frank (Bryan Brown) along with his wife Charlotte (Greta Scacchi) at their stunning and secluded Palm Beach property in Sydney, Australia. Joining them are lifelong friends and long-married couples, Leo (Sam Neill) and Bridget (Jacqueline McKenzie), and Billy (Richard E. Grant) and Eva (Heather Mitchell).

The trio of Frank, Leo, and Billy were all part of fictional Australian band, Pacific Sideburns, which the film uses as a binding and contentious plot element throughout. Early on, we’re shown a framed 1977 cover of Rolling Stone magazine with the headline, The Pacific Sideburns: Surf’s Up! The New Wave, and shop-window dream-scene performance by the now-aged group.

Frank, the band’s manager, has sold his business and now suffers from depression and apathy equal to his subsequent fortune, Leo is struggling with identity and unresolved paternal issues as a fading journalist, and Billy has declined into a bitter, sarcastic sell-out, capitalising on the band’s ‘77 hit song, Fearless, and using it in a commercial for adult diapers.

Palm Beach is a film which is so very easy to hate. No doubt the polarising opinions of its story, cast, and themes will scream of privilege and excess, baby-boomer woes and real-life film-industry nepotism, most likely with excessive amounts of eye-rolling and holier-than-thou superiority sewn throughout. However, that reaction is dull, and frankly, unwarranted for a film that achieves exactly what – in the words of director, Rachel Ward – it sets out to be: a nostalgia trip for Baby Boomers.

The location of Palmy is absolutely stunning, and the cinematography of Bonnie Elliott captures this with a tourism-advert style that feels naturally reflective of the area. Waterfront views, crystal surf, lush and expansive topography – it’s a film that savours in its aesthetic because it’s designed to do so. It’s a film that unashamedly celebrates the beauty of what middle-class, middle-aged success can bring, while reminding the audience that these people have the same issues as most others – inadequacy, doubt, regret, mortality, loneliness, longing and yearning for lost or unappreciated love.

There are some tragically misjudged moments which drew the wrong reaction from the wine-swilling audience – the standout of which was a heartbreaking allusion to Charlotte’s mastectomy which the audience burst into laughter at under the false notion her fake breast was an attempt to ‘be sexy’ rather than clutch onto her humanity – which reflects the approach many will take to this film: anyone who can’t identify with these characters or empathise with them will viciously look for reasons to laugh at them instead of with them.

Although the dining table dramedy is wildly popular in France and Italy, it’s refreshing to see this genre portrayed in a distinctly Australian way. Palm Beach won’t reinvent the wheel, and it lacks the depth required to make it much more than a film of guilty pleasure. Ultimately, however, it succeeds in being exactly what it sets out to be: an aesthetically gorgeous film that will make you hungry with its lavish food presentation, laugh and dry your eye at painfully human moments, and perhaps remind a younger audience that their parents are people too, people who deserve love and compassion, just like everyone else.

Oxford Lamoureaux