Journeyman director Russell Mulcahy’s Swimming Upstream, an adaptation of an autobiographical book by Tony Fingleton and his sister Diane, is a heroic tale of an almost-legend, a talented young man who overcame a tormented childhood to fulfill his ability as a sportsman and earn respect as a human being. As much a character study of Tony’s troubled father, Harold (Geoffrey Rush), it’s a familiar, conventional take on that swiftly mounting suburban malaise – the aberrant dysfunctional family, the same one seen reflected as routinely in the modern world as the film’s period setting beginning in the late 1950’s. Played as a young adult by Jesse Spencer, Tony has the cards stacked heavily against him from the outset: his family are Brisbane battlers, mother Dora (Judy Davis) their grim-faced plough-horse, saving every last dollar but cursed with the misfortune of falling for a wretched self-hating drunk whose own childhood ghosts continue to take chunks out of his self-esteem, leaving him a ruined shell of a man.

Lumbered with a large family of five kids, Dora’s burden becomes increasingly unmanageable under the weight of limited finances and an irresponsible husband. Avoiding domestic responsibilities, Harold is most adept at frittering away their earnings on sorrow-drowning sessions down at the local. He happily encourages eldest son Harold Jnr. to use Tony as a punching bag and is disgusted by Tony’s arty inclinations, like an interest in the piano, which he sees as an affront to his own masculinity. Consequently he harbors an irrational grudge that borders on gross neglect, though it’s momentarily put on hold when he notices how well Tony can swim. The only trouble is that another son, John (later played by Tim Draxl) is on a par with Tony in the pool and naturally Harold gravitates towards him, hell-bent on assuming responsibility for a success story that not only conquers the swimming world at large, but Tony first and foremost. It’s a form of unhealthy competition that will create tension for the entire family as the pair progress through the ranks, all the way to the national titles.

Rush is uncomfortably convincing in what is surely the most unsympathetic role of his career to date; Harold’s a despicable, pathetic creature who uses his own father’s unsavoury abuse of him as a crutch; that it’s raised by Dora as a rationalisation for the torment he inflicts only makes it harder to swallow. Just as we’re hoping Harold will turn the corner of absolution and reveal a tiny sliver of tenderness for the boy, he redoubles his efforts to discredit Tony’s achievements, trying to denigrate their worth in the eyes of the family. He even instigates an intensive campaign to set John on a more direct collision course with Tony in the pool, re-directing him towards Tony’s specialist event, the backstroke.

Davis is typically good, evoking the drudgery and hardship of Dora’s life in the grim set of her jaundiced face and dour determination to savour the success of her sons. Treating her offspring equally shouldn’t be such an onerous task but she’s overcome by a need that occasionally horrifies her: to redress the imbalance created by Harold’s lop-sided encouragement and disregard for Tony. Spencer plays Tony with the kind of cut-and-paste purity that seems gleaned from years of poring over midday movies for their definitions of nuance and subtlety. Is that the trace of a halo wafting over his head in select scenes? Maybe not, but how can we fail to feel for him, trapped between a rock and a hard place with a father who bemoans his very entry into the world – in a scene that cuts like a knife but meaningfully shapes Tony’s fierce determination to push onwards and follow his dream.

Why does Dora stay with this man for so long? Is she just enacting the vengeful, repeating patterns we associate in film with the working classes? Battered women clinging to the devil they know rather than test the waters of the great beyond? It could be argued she braces herself against the onslaught for the sake of her children which, taken at face value, is a devastating sacrifice to make but credible nonetheless. Though Fingleton’s screenplay squeezes every drop of empathy from us, failing to offer any compulsively fresh insights, it would take a hardened heart to dismiss this tokenistic but poignant story.

Mulcahy and his cinematographer Martin McGrath occasionally incorporate flashy techniques, like swiftly mutating split-screen shots during races to capture the heat of competition from different perspectives. It helps spruce things up which is fantastic news because swimming isn’t exactly a sport with big screen potential written all over it. At least the director has the good sense to trim the races down to their essential parts whilst adding a hint of creative flair; enough so we aren’t deluded into actually thinking there might be documentarians behind the camera.

With neat cameos from greats of the sport (Dawn Fraser and Murray Rose) Swimming Upstream has just the right width of scope to make it crowd pleasing fare even though it’s depressingly overloaded with clichés. The two young leads over-do the earnest, fresh-faced innocence of a maligned youth, but luckily the film is anchored by the performances of Davis and especially Rush; in his portrayal of Harold, he even comes close, at times, to turning a neglectful, loathsome creation into something we feel the faintest stirrings of pity for. Comes close, I said.

Review by David O’Connell

Director: Russell Mulcahy
Screenwriters: Anthony Fingleton, Diane Fingleton (from novel)
Cast: Geoffrey Rush, Judy Davis, Jesse Spencer, Tim Draxl, David Hoflin, Craig Horner, Brittany Byrnes