Three Dollars 

With his second feature film, Robert Connolly, director of crowd-pleaser The Bank, takes a bold risk by revisiting a 
familiar theme with a story that largely shies away from conventional narrative patterns. Based upon Elliot Perlman's 
acclaimed novel, Three Dollars is what Connolly and Perlman both like to regard as 'a detective story of the human heart'.

We first meet genial everyman Eddie (Wenham) at a particularly low point, as he gathers up his belongs into a cardboard 
box and is led unceremoniously from his former place of employment and out into the street. Eddie's thoughtful voice-over
 muses over the one truly dependable aspect of his life thus far: with an almost mathematical precision, every nine and a 
half years Eddie crosses paths with his childhood sweetheart, Amanda Claremont (Wynter). Each one of these semi-regular 
irregularities not only mark Eddie's progress, but also threaten to irrevocably change the course his life will take.

"We pretty much decided up-front that we weren't going to tell the story in a linear order," says Connolly, "and that there 
would be a cumulative structure, so that all of the different pieces, the sum of them led to the effect, rather than the 
traditional narrative trajectory. It's a whole life in some ways." Novelist Elliot Perlman, who's joined the director on 
his promotional tour of the country, says he admires Connolly's ability to quickly and economically establish the cues 
that tell you all you need to know about the family dynamics. "there's a wonderful richness of detail, a back story, like 
when they come home from the beach and Kate (Nabout) has been talking to Tanya about her husband - you've got the couple 
having a social life in an instant."

Elliot Perlman divides his time these days between writing and practicing law, and was originally moved to write the novel 
as an angry portrait of a society that had become largely indifferent to the plight of individuals within that same society. "I was brought up to be on the left of the political spectrum, and in the last twenty years I saw economic rationalism grab Australia by the throat. What disturbed me even more than the political success of 'Reaganomics' and 'Thatcher-ism', was the fact that it was our own Labor Party who had brought it in first. Not since the Second World War has Australia been so insecure; the employed live in fear of being downsized and the unemployed live in fear of ever finding a job." "It's a theme that's in The Bank as well," adds Connolly, " - an individual in the face of the bigger, corporate world in that film, and here again it's the frustration as an individual, as powers that are kind of greater than you circle around, impacting upon everything you're doing."

One significant problem Connolly and Perlman had to address with the film was the essentially internal nature of Eddie's 
character, and indeed his story, and how to get this across on film. "The structure was the first step," says Connolly, 
"using those different visual textures to represent the different times of his life - Eddie as a boy, shot on a 16mm Bolex, 
and his and Tanya's marriage, which we shot on an old, bulky, video camera from the eighties, with a cable and everything . 
We did decide to use some voice-over to kind of hook you in, and to have Eddie leading you through it. This was the idea of 
seeing the film as a kind of detective story of the heart, a guy at a moment of crisis looking back over his life and 
analysing all the pieces to work out how he's ended up in this predicament."

Another was the fact that Eddie is, on the surface at least, a fairly unremarkable man. "Cinema is rich with characters at 
extremes," says Connolly, "you know, we love our aberrant characters, we love our Chopper Reads, and our Brett Spragues. 
It's been a long time since cinema has dealt with the characters Jimmy Stewart used to play in the Capra films, and it's 
a lot more difficult to tell a story about a good man making his way in the world. At one point we were looking at tag 
lines for the movie, like 'It's not such a wonderful life!'.

"David Wenham said it made it the biggest challenge for him," confirms Connolly, "of any character he's ever played; it's 
much easier for him to play Brett Sprague in The Boys, or Spiteri from Getting' Square, or things with an external character 
trait, than to play a genuinely good guy. What we worked on was the idea of taking a good man and testing him through the 
film; and it tests him in fidelity issues with his wife; it tests him as a father when Abby gets sick; it tests him as a 
husband as Tanya's dealing with her depression; it tests him economically; it tests him at work with his ethical choices, 
and it tests him morally at the train station. So, as you watch the film, what we hoped to achieve was a sense of a man who 
the world pours down a lot of trouble on, which we watch, thinking 'can the world break him?'.To this day there are some 
people who say he made the wrong choices, and I love the kind of ambiguous nature of some of those choices - I mean, they're 
not ambiguous for me; I think clearly he does the right thing."

"I had a lot of people talk to me about the book," adds Perlman, "and in particular young women will say they loved Eddie 
up until a certain point, when he makes a particular choice, and I always try to make the point that - and the film does 
this too - don't be angry with him; be angry with the society that's made him choose between the well-being of society or 
the well-being of his family. It shouldn't be that way."

_TIM STEWART

Posted on April 20, 2005 05:11 PM
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