When was the last time you saw a modern feel-good movie that was honest about its feelings? Where the laughter and tears didn't feel forced or syrupy? A movie where intelligent characters triumph to achieve something more then themselves, with the same kind of honesty and integrity as a Frank Capra film? The time has come again, with Rob Sitch's The Dish.
There have been many excellent movies in the last two years that have challenged what a movie could be - Fight Club, Three Kings, Magnolia, American Beauty, and Being John Malkovich, to name a few. However, there was also a dark edge to each. While they may have been exciting, they certainly were not heartwarming. They also had a strong dose of R-rated violence and language, which might have discouraged parents from taking the kids.
Trying to tug at heartstrings is a dangerous tightrope act - it is so easy to take the manipulative route and choke with sentimentality. The other extreme is to dip every scene in irony, where all meaning is sacrificed so we can distance ourselves from any feeling at all for fear of appearing sappy. Not many films find the middle ground. The Dish is one that does.
Ironically enough, it took an Australian creative team to re-create the spirit of Frank Capra so perfectly. The Dish tells the largely unknown tale of Parks, a small town in Australia with the largest satellite dish in the Southern Hemisphere. It was the only dish large enough to carry TV images from the moon to the earth at the time, and it was (and still is) located in the middle of a sheep paddock. (Fortunately, the sheep jokes are kept to a minimum.)
The crew that runs the dish is composed of three Australian locals and one NASA Yankee - Sam Neill (Jurassic Park, Event Horizon), Kevin Harrington, Tom Long, and Patrick Warburton as the NASA engineer. Their mission is to have the dish ready to go as a backup receiver during the Apollo 11 mission. It's a relatively small job, but they are very proud to play their part.
As are the locals. The mayor (Roy Billing) and his wife are making a huge fuss that both the Prime Minister of Australia and the American Ambassador will be visiting, which means the local school band will have to memorize the US national anthem. The dish's solitary security guard Rudi (Tayler Kane) has decided that his job is now of national importance and starts carrying a gun, secretly hoping his mum doesn't find out and take it away from him. And Glenn (Tom Long), the fourth dish crewmember, considers that now might just be the time to finally get up the courage to ask Janine (Eliza Szonert) out.
Director Rob Sitch (The Castle) guides the cast with a gentle hand, letting the humor come out at its own pace. With the soundtrack complimenting the story beautifully - old classics like 'Magic Carpet Ride' and 'Classical Gas' pop up - he shows us fully fleshed characters populating a sparse but gorgeously filmed landscape, sheep and all. The film was shot on location, making it all the more real and wonderful.
The Dish is not a sweeping epic or a film that breaks any new ground. However, it is refreshingly old fashioned and the most fun you'll have in a theater until the summer. A postcard from another time, when landing on the moon was something we thought impossible... and yet maybe it wasn't. The Dish reminds us in a funny and gentle way that anything so wonderful as going into space is more than dollars and fuel. Take your parents.
