Kangaroo Island

Synopsis: A woman in crisis heads home to Australia’s Kangaroo Island. She has a reunion with her family and a reckoning with her past.

Kangaroo Island sounds like a fairy tale place where any kid would want to live. But it’s real.  It’s about 70 miles off mainland Australia’s southeast coast. There are kangaroos, of course, lots of them- about 65,000! The chocolate-colored roos, a subspecies of the Western Grey kangaroo, are cutely smaller and stockier than most other kangaroos. Other island animals include Victorian koalas, echidnas and marine animals like dolphins, sea lions and penguins. Luckily for the animals there are no dingoes or other predators. (Although dogs and cats pose a danger.) Yes, there are sharks that circle the island, too. So, stay out of the water! Australians, however, are constitutionally driven to the ocean for all manner of sport.

Along with the animals, live people with their people problems in Kangaroo Island. Lou Wells (Rebecca Breeds) is from Kangaroo Island. In her mid-thirties, she left the island about ten years earlier to work as an actor in Los Angeles. No word on why she didn’t have some home allegiance and audition for spots on the Aussie shows Neighbors or Home and Away. Employment has dried up lately. Lou fills her time with hook-ups and drinking. She’s squatting at her ex-boyfriend’s who tells her she needs to move out. Yeah, she’s kind of a train wreck. But you know how they say that you never know what someone’s going through? It seems that Lou has more than money problems causing her tailspin.

When her dad Rory (Erik Thomson) sends her a paper plane ticket home like it’s 1980, she has no intention of returning. But the day of, she pulls over on the freeway (!) to take a call, and a cop pulls up. Lou only has her passport and the ticket so the cop says the car will be impounded, but she can give her a ride to the airport. Ha! Yeah, LA cops are always bringing license-free drivers around the vast city. (It’s surely a good thing that the filmmakers didn’t shoot in LA because of cost but also, if they did try to film the side of the highway scene in LA, they’d probably still be stuck on the 405.)

After a few shots at an airport bar, Lou gets on the home back to Australia. She arrives at the little airport near Kangaroo Island’s biggest town, Kingscote. She’s having a beer when her dad arrives to pick her up. And they’re cautiously pleased to see each other. He offers to carry her luggage, but being too embarrassed to admit how she ended up leaving California, she lies and says her luggage is lost. Since most people on the island kinda know each other, Rory promises he’ll enlist friends to track down the non-existent suitcase.

One thing, besides drugs, that Lou wisely did not bring is honey. Yes, honey. Any import of honey or bee products, or heaven forfend, an actual bee stowaway is strictly forbidden. This is because the Ligurian bees on the island are the last purebreds of their kind. Evil varroa mites from the mainland could kill them! Kangaroo Island with its 5,000 strong human population is an interesting place what with its special bees and chlamydia-free koalas*.

Off the honeyless dad and daughter drive to the family home. It’s a modest house on gorgeous, surely very valuable land, that sits on a hill above an undisturbed beach. As they exit the car, Rory tells Lou that her sister Freya (Adelaide Clemens) is there from Adelaide with her family. She’s startled and stops in her tracks. Her two nephews, elementary-aged boys, out on school break, rush out of the house to greet her. Lou’s close-in-age sister comes out and the two awkwardly hug. Their Auntie Rose (Julie Wood) is on hand for the family reunion too. She provides a little comic relief when she smilingly questions Lou as to why she isn’t taking the better parts she deserves. Her sister, the girls’ mom, passed years before when they were little. But that has nothing to do with why they don’t get along now.

Who’s that surfer emerging from the water? It’s  Freya’s rugged and handsome husband Ben (Joel Jackson).  I should mention that, despite her dissolute lifestyle, Lou is stunning. The girls met Ben at the beach about ten years ago when his family moved to the island and he was a uni student.

FLASHBACK…

Ten years ago, Ben and Lou had a fling. You could tell that Freya had a crush on Ben but was too shy to pursue it. Cheeky Lou was flirty with Ben. One night when Lou asks if anyone wants to join her skinny dipping, Ben waits a nano second before rushing after her. Freya frowns when she’s left alone. No, Freya. You are the smart one. Those fools are going into shark-infested waters!

Later on, Lou tells Ben she’s going to LA and why doesn’t he join her? He says he doesn’t want to go to America and why doesn’t she stay? Well, she goes and Ben marries Freya. No wonder Lou hasn’t wanted to visit.

Back to NOW…

The sisters are getting along okay and Lou is enjoying being with her nephews and dad. She and her dad go swimming together. Lou says she’s missed the Aussie wildlife like the roos and White-bellied sea eagles that soar above. She says she didn’t miss the sharks, the snakes, the spiders and the bull ants. Bull ants? The internet informs me that they are “large, aggressive insects.” Bull ants have big compound eyes, the better to see their real and perceived enemies.  Dear God— they also have powerful jaws and stingers that do not detach, but keep stinging! Okay, Kangarooers, time to move to Antarctica where only the cold can kill you.

While Lou successfully dodges dodgy wildlife, she unsuccessfully evades Freya’s proselytizing. Back at the family home, her sister gives her a Bible, telling her she wants Lou to let Jesus into her life. Lou cuts her off and heads to the fridge to grab another beer. Is there something in the air? Do all Aussies guzzle beer like water?

Sitting around the kitchen table one night after dinner, the sisters’, their longtime friend Todd (Louis Henbest), Ben, Rory and Rose talk about L I F E. Freya explains that God must exist because the chances are so small that a planet could support life. God must have designed Earth and life itself. Ben, Mr. Astronomy Grad, counters that physics tells us that anything that is possible becomes inevitable. (I’ve seen movies about this where Gwyneth Paltrow has one lover in one universe and another lover in another universe.) Looking emotional, Lou declares that people just want to think they’re special. But our lives are no more special than, say, an ant’s life. (Also the title of an animated movie in the 90’s that hoped to trick parents into renting the title, thinking it was Pixar’s A Bug’s Life.) Lou says that when an ant dies, there isn’t a little ant soul that floats to an ant heaven. Everyone at the table looks sad. Whether they feel sorry for themselves or the ants, I don’t know. Maybe both. Thankfully, one of the boys playing in the next room pipes up and asks: Did God make ice cream?  No, that would be Ben & Jerry. (The Vermont pair’s Non-Dairy Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough is really good.)

As the days shuffle along, pious Freya is getting on Lou’s last nerve. She goes on about sin. It got me wondering if there was something she felt guilty about.  She also quizzes Lou on what she and Ben talk about. Actually, it’s Ben making googly eyes at Lou. When did these two last have sex?

Who is this Liam they keep talking about? Maybe celebrated Aussie actor Liam Hemsworth? Yeah, nah. He spends his time in posh Byron Bay in New South Wales.

Did something bad happen to Lou in LA to make her so depressed?

Kangaroo Island mixes existential angst (what will happen to the threatened white bellied sea eagles and the heartsick Wells family?) and soap (will the sisters get in a fighting match over Ben?).

The question I can answer about Kangaroo Island, the place, is that yes, kids would love it: the beach, the roos and the clear night skies with the Milky Way, the Southern Cross and sometimes even the Southern Lights’ (Aurora Australis) shimmering waves of colors.

The movie and the island are worth a visit.

 

*Chlamydia in koalas (common in mainland Australia) causes blindness, infertility and UTIs. It can be fatal. Antibiotics can treat the bacterial disease, but it can also cause severe gastrointestinal effects. the University of the Sunshine Coast is working on a vaccine.

P.S.  Kangaroo Island was devastated by the December 2019 – February 2020 wildfires. Fires burned over half of the island– more than 200,000 hectares.  It’s estimated that 3 billion wild animals (mammals, birds and reptiles) were killed or displaced. Two people lost their lives along with 60,000 farm animals. For info on wildlife rescue click here

P.P.S  Beautiful Kangaroo Island (roughly 90 miles long & 35 miles wide) is a popular tourist destination for mainland Aussies with roughly 270,000 annual visitors. It was originally inhabited by humans thousands of years ago but then abandoned. Read here about aboriginal peoples living there today.

Movie Loon Movie Review Shortcut:

Grade:  B+

Cut to the Chase: A deeply human story by screenwriter Sally Gifford. It adds one too many pieces of drama that are pretty soapy/cliched, but Rebecca Breeds’ performance and the poetic photography of the land, sea and wild animals bring home the message that relationships are the heart of life on our beautiful planet.

Humor Highlight:  The running joke about the luggage or this…When Lou & her dad get in the ocean, she tells him that she never used to be scared of sharks, he chuckles and says: You’re going soft.