Francisco Alberoni, high falutin’ critical theorist that he is, wrote in the 1960s that celebrities make an unknowable world knowable – that if you can whittle the whole big scary planet down to a motley collection of whining money grubbers who cry at the Oscars and find ever more unlikely ways to congeal their names into celebrity couple monikers, things are pretty much, in the eyes of the public, okay. Brangelina translates across all cultural boundaries and becomes the shared cultural commodity of western civilization. So when celebrities lose their public face and find themselves halfway back to the nobodies they once were, should we still care? What exactly is the worth of meeting someone famous, or worse still, half famous, whose celebrity exists in some dank past a little before their transgressions?

So never meet your heroes, as the tagline of Tony Rogers’s directorial debut goes. You might be in for disappointment. You might be in for worse.

Rogers’s ‘Rats and Cats,’ more successfully than not, milks a comedic premise out of the comparative worth of celebrity culture. The film is a character piece in the most literal sense; Ben (Adam Zwar), a ‘Where are They Now?’ columnist for an inner city rag, is sent to backwater Australia to profile the newest favourite son of a small Victorian backwater-berg, burnt out one-timer Darren McWarren (Jason Gann). His face dominates a welcoming billboard to the town; his band is prone to rocking out at weekends at the local bar. He lives in the closest thing the community can approximate to a country manor with his entourage of one: Bruce (Paul Denny), a slobbish squatter type who takes up the urgent tasks of fixing weedeaters and generally playing the pseudo-butler in throes to McWarren’s sizeable ego. And the town girls surround as well, all of who seem on their way to being the easy, bored, eventual conquests of McWarren. So, who is Darren now? What have his indiscretions earnt him? And what does his former celebrity mean to him in a place such as this?

Zwar and Gann have collectively had an unlikely but deserved upward rise through the ranks with their short film ‘Wilfred,’ featuring some post-coital awkwardness and Gann in a dog suit, expanded to a full length series for SBS; a show seemingly predestined for the kinds of cultish appreciation that only animal costumes and late night government broadcasting can facilitate. It’s exciting to see them given a platform here, and the success or otherwise of the film throughout rests squarely on their shoulders.

It’s obvious the involvement that the two have had through the development of the script through the film; this feels very much like a movie made from the ground up by all those principally involved. To its credit, Rats and Cats doesn’t go out of its way to appropriate the kinds of easy city mouse/country mouse conventions that could so lazily have been slotted into something like this – the town is small town Australia, no more, no less, and its nudging satire never extends into expendability. Even McWarren’s band manages to keep one half-step back from the most obvious trappings of the Spinal-Tap-meets-pub-rock experience it could have been. The whole basis of the humour is wry, understated dialogue with no broad or signposted setups, deadpan delivery and a kind of sustained mock-sincerity/faux-ego driven writing that feels different to the kind of crap that Australian film and television audiences who watched The Wedge, or You and Your Stupid Mate may next find themselves not laughing at. The formula here is creating absurdity in the situations and then underplaying them to the point where  the lack of reaction and complicity in them keeps giving what is ostensibly a very low key film an actual sense of momentum. And what gets laughs that are a little more than cheap. Of course, some audiences whose principal requirements of a comedy are those kind of cheap and broad laughs may alternatively find little that tickles them here.

The two leads hence engineer a brilliant, unusual comic spark between them, which nevertheless is probably only repeatable and probably only works in one way, these characters coming off as essentially extensions of the Wilfred cast that may already be familiar to some viewers. Gann as the self assured egotist, whose confidence, however misplaced, cannot be questioned; Zwar as the slightly befuddled everyman, who greets every unlikely scenario with a mixture of restraint and bemusement. They’ve done it before, and very recently, and there’s a reason why they’re recycling those kinds of traits in different characters here.

It must be said, though, that the film feels like it battles against itself at times from wanting to hurtle downhill towards a full throttle indie quirk fest, its small story at one point strangely detouring into a scuba-ing adventure which seems skittish and inserted into the script for not more than its sheer sense of quirkiness. Quirkiness unto itself has sunk many a Sundance-whoring American indie in the last few years, that kind of thing developing into an ever easier, ever-lazier sort of sub-genre, until the summer quirk film has become the independent sets’ response to the generic major studio blockbuster. Anyhoo, rant aside, it tends towards that line at a few moments, and manages to catch itself for the most part.

Rats and Cats does unfortunately run out of spark a little towards the end, by indulging a dark streak in its humour that doesn’t quite pay off and playing the sex and (near) death cards somewhat pointlessly, to an ending that cools the mood. This admittedly feels like a film that’s charm is so resolutely, deliberately low key that many viewers may just have trouble remembering it a week or two from watching it. But nonetheless, as a local comedy confident enough not to throw its comedic setups in your face, Rats and Cats hides its craft well enough to be attention-grabbing.

Review by Al Cossar

Director: Tony Rogers
Screenplay: Jason Gann
Cast: Jason Gann, Adam Zwar, Anya Beyersdorf, Paul Denny, Alexis Porter, Jess Beazley, Gary Rens, Belle Leslie, Angus Sampson, Matthew Moloney
Running time: 88 minutes
Australian theatrical release date: 15 May, 2008