Ben O'Shea: It Doesn’t Usually End Well.

Ben O’Shea reviews the new Julia Garner & Hugo Weaving movie The Royal Hotel and gives Clairsy & Lisa his verdict. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Break the flick with ben o'she on ninety six A FM.
Can I been good to see you. Good morning guys,
We've got an interesting one for you today. Okay, So
do you remember a few years ago, back to twenty sixteen,
there was a documentary that came out called Hotel cool
Guardi that made a few headlines and so it was
basically there wasn't much to it. They basically took a

(00:21):
camera crew out to Coolgardi in the wa Goldfields, to
the pub in town there and basically filmed what happened
over the course of a couple of weeks when two
finished backpackers arrived in town. So Fly on the Wall
doco about what these backpackers experienced serving beers at the
pub and the sort of conversations they had with the

(00:43):
blokes who came into the pub, which, as you can imagine,
a lot of mining blokes, a lot of old timers
from the Goldfields who probably hadn't met too many finished
backpackers in their lives, and so we're very excited to
have at what they called and they put it up
on a sandwich board at the front of the pub
said fresh meat at the pub time and so a

(01:03):
lot of people, a lot of people who watched it,
certainly in the gold Fields and in original Wa and
maybe Australians would have looked at it and gone, well,
you know, that's just a country pub. That's just what
happens in a country pub. That's called ghardi. But when
the documentary was screened in big cities and especially big
cities around the world, it created a furor. People were like, oh,
this is you know, rampant misogyny, sexism, sexual harassment, this

(01:28):
is not okay, which, of course it's not okay the
fifties and so it was at a film festival at
the time of its release, and sitting on the jury
panel of that film festival was Ossie director Kitty Green.
So do you remember a couple of years ago there
was a film called The Assistant starring Julia Garner from Ozark,

(01:49):
the blonde American actress with a really curly blonde hair.
You recognize it instantly. His favorite in this film, The Assist,
and she played the assistant of a film production company
in the US. It was basically like a Weinstein like
me too kind of situation, but you never saw the

(02:09):
Weinstein figure. He was just this voice in another office,
and it was her kind of story as psychological. It's
really good. It's a really good, kind of understated thriller
about that era of sexual harassment in the workplace anyway,
And so Kitty Green, the director of that movie, watched
Hotel col Guardi and thought, you know what, this would

(02:30):
be a great fictional movie. So she's basically done a
remake of the doco called The Royal Hotel, set in
a pub in the outback, very similar to the cool
Guardi Hotel, but instead of finished backpackers, it's us backpackers.
She's cast her good mate Julia Ganer as one of
the backpackers, Hannah and Jessica Henwick, another American actress who

(02:54):
was in the Matrix Resurrections just recently as live and
these two backpackers arrive in town as temp jobs working
at a pub to earn a bit of holiday money,
and then they go through a very similar experience to
what we saw in the doco, you know, as they're
pouring the beers, the blokes on the other side of
the bar a sort of wolf whistling at them and
trying to chat them up, mostly pretty harmless, in a

(03:16):
kind of a low key sexual harassment kind of way.
But then on top of all of that is maybe
the idea that there's a bit more menace involved. And
I don't know about you guys, but anytime I see
a movie that's set in the Australian outback involving foreign backpackers,
I immediately that Wolf Creek, Wolf Creek actually happen. Usually

(03:37):
end well, It doesn't usually end well. And Wake in
Fright was another film sort of setting the outback of
a very very amazing film too, And so you know
that that's in the back of your mind as you're
watching this film, like, where is it going to go?
Is it going to go into a territory that's going
to be really grim? Please tell us John Jarrett's not
in it. Well, John Jared's on it. But there is
another Ossie icon in it. Hugo Weaving, who plays the
publican of this hotel, can be creepy. It's in this

(04:00):
he's kind of like battling his own demons with the
drink and he's got it. That's he's reached this point
of his career where he's playing only playing kind of
like drunk reprobates. He does it so well though he's
fantastic in this and and this menacing mood that comes
over the film is supplied by really one of the

(04:21):
pub patrons who's played by Daniel Henshall. And so if
you've seen the movie Snowtown, so Snowtown is an amazing film.
It is one of the most grim Australian movies. I
struggle to recommend it to people, even though it's so amazing.
It is a dark, dark film, and so Daniel Henshall's
character in Snowtown was hard to watch, and so he

(04:43):
brings that some of the most unlikable people. And I
don't know how film more old Dan Henchell. I don't
know how he ever gets a job anywhere else, I know,
except for playing these type of rocks. And so he's
playing this character who is sort of always hanging around,
sort of leering at the girls, and when they go
upstairs to the pub to sleep at night, he's sort

(05:04):
of just hanging around in the corridors loiter. He's loitering,
and so so you get this sense of growing dread
about what's going to happen in the movie, as well
as these girls trying to you know, sort of enjoy
their outback experience, and the live character is a bit
more naive and outgoing, and Julia Garner's character, Hannah is
you know, she's a bit more suspicious of all of

(05:25):
these Aussie blokes. And so it's that kind of like
light and shade that you get in the film. And
in the end it kind of, you know, works its
way to a conclusion that is pretty sort of satisfying,
I guess in the end. But it's you know, it's
a fascinating insight into what goes on in Australian country
pubs and probably a few Australian city pubs as well.

(05:45):
And it'll make audiences ask, you know, like, what are
we willing to accept as part of Ozzie society? Is
this behavior acceptable? Is it just you know, like you know,
just harmless or is there something more going on? It
would be interesting to see how audiences react. All right,
very interesting. How many backpacker you give? Well, we'll see

(06:10):
how many survive. But I'm going to give this one
three and a half. Okay, it's a good one. It
sounds good. Thank you, Ben, Thank you guys.