Danny Deckchair dir. Jeff Balsmeyer
Opens Fri Sept 3.
Australia seems to have a stranglehold on schmaltzy, vaguely gay romantic comedies about oddballs and ugly ducklings who turn into heroes and swans over the course of 90 often excruciating minutes. Remember Love Serenade, Strictly Ballroom, Muriel’s Wedding? The genre is hereby enlarged by the existence of Danny Deckchair, a painfully forced romp about an eccentric construction worker (Rhys Ifans) who rebels against his unfaithful shrew of a wife by tying a bunch of oversized helium balloons to an aluminum folding chair and flying away. As fate would have it, he lands in the backyard of a hot woman (Miranda Otto) who people inexplicably consider dumpy, but who is transformed, via Danny’s inevitable love, into a gorgeous gamine. The wife, meanwhile, blossoms into a full-blooded bitch under the glare of Danny’s in absentia media notoriety, and her affair with a D-grade TV sports commentator rages on.
It’s not so much that this film isn’t funny, though it isn’t, or that its twists and turns are both implausible and utterly predictable, though they are. The problem with Danny Deckchair is that the spirit of irreverence and whimsy that makes its predecessors so unexpectedly enjoyable is totally absent. In place of that spirit, we get a hyperactive camera that substitutes visual gimmicks for human charm (no big surprise since the director is a longtime storyboard artist), and a script that reduces the irreducible elements of the Aussie Ugly Duckling genre into a crassly calculated formula. Ifans and Otto (who fared only slightly better together in Michel Gondry’s Human Nature) are as pleasing as ever. But the movie stinks like yesterday’s barbie.
