Muriel’s Wedding: Tim Tams and tragedy

This is one of the funniest sequences in the film – indeed in any Australian film – but the speed with which the director PJ Hogan changes the mood is quite remarkable. Part of what made the film fresh was that he was willing to take enormous risks with comedy and this is a prime example. Muriel has just reached a point of extreme happiness – all of which changes in an instant.

Muriel's Wedding synopsis

Muriel Heslop (Toni Collette) is the eldest daughter of a family of underachievers. Her father Bill (Bill Hunter) is a corrupt town councillor in the northern NSW town of Porpoise Spit; her mother Betty (Jeanie Drynan) looks perpetually stunned. Her brothers and sisters are lazy, overweight television addicts. Muriel’s only solace is the music of Abba, and her dream of one day having a beautiful wedding, something that her alleged 'girlfriends’ tell her she’ll never have. Muriel’s life changes when she runs into Rhonda Epinstalk (Rachel Griffiths), a former school friend. They run away to Sydney to discover a wider world (after Muriel has stolen $12,000 from her father), but fate keeps threatening to drag them back to Porpoise Spit. When a serious disease threatens Rhonda’s independence, they make a promise to stick together and never go back.

Muriel's Wedding curator's notes

Muriel’s Wedding took Australia by storm when it opened in 1994. Not only did it introduce two new actors of genuinely stark talent (Toni Collette and Rachel Griffiths), both of whom would become international stars, it satirised an Australian family in a way that audiences found extremely moving, as well as hilarious.

Writer-director PJ Hogan’s depiction of a battler family from a forgettable north coast backwater is relentlessly bleak, but also immensely sympathetic (with more than a passing resemblance to Jane Austen’s Persuasion). Hogan doesn’t create an ironic distance, from which an audience may look down; he keeps us closely identified with his characters so that we see ourselves.

Most of this identification is through Muriel, but not all – Hogan is careful to give us a sense of desolation and disappointment that befuddles all members of the Heslop family, from the father down. Bill Hunter’s blustering patriarch is one of Australian cinema’s most pungently awful characters. Although never actually evil, he has raised a tribe of children to believe they’re 'useless’, and that’s how they behave. Jeanie Drynan, as his wife, has become almost catatonic in her distraction – a portrait of a wasted life that is completely tragic. Critics have suggested a connection between the Heslops and the Rudd family from the silent movie On Our Selection (and various sequels), suggesting that Australian cinema tends toward 'a celebration of ugliness’. Muriel is certainly an ugly duckling, and it isn’t really clear by the end that she will become a swan. Rather, Paul J Hogan’s aim, as he has said, was to celebrate the ugly duckling for herself.

'Usually in Australian films, definitely in Australian television, definitely in American films, the central character is usually the Sophie Lee character. … Muriel in these stories is left out or consigned to a position of best friend, one to feel sorry for … I wanted to put that kind of character centre-stage and the beautiful best friend in the position of living horror’. Tom O’Regan, in Australian National Cinema (Routledge 1996), points out that this celebration of ugliness is common in Australian film, going as far back as the not-so-pretty protagonists in The Sentimental Bloke (1919), or the 'daggy’ charms of Bazza McKenzie (from the 1970s). It is arguably an expression of Australia’s outpost mentality, our distance from the metropolitan 'centres’ of culture and beauty (once London, more recently New York). This is sometimes interpreted as the 'cultural cringe’, but in Muriel’s Wedding it is a statement of evolution, an escape from what the architect Robyn Boyd called 'the great Australian ugliness’. That’s why the film has so many shots of cars and taxis driving away from the Heslop family home in Porpoise Spit. This is the Australia that once was, PJ Hogan seems to be saying, but no one has to live there any more. A film like The Castle makes a similar observation about the dagginess of Australian domesticity, but a different conclusion – you’d be mad to want to move!

Notes by Paul Byrnes

Education Notes

This clip shows Muriel (Toni Collette) and Bruce (Matt Day) entering a room, sitting on a beanbag and watching television. Bill Heslop (Bill Hunter), Muriel’s father, appears on the television pleading for news from her. The scene descends into farce as Bruce tries to undress Muriel, mistakenly unzipping the beanbag instead of her jeans. A window breaks, beans erupt and two naked males rush into the room. Flatmate Rhonda (Rachel Griffiths) enters, falls and says she cannot feel her legs. Muriel is then seen waiting at the hospital.

Educational value points

• The descent into farce in this seduction scene relies on a few key elements. Bruce’s lustful determination is balanced by Muriel’s ticklishness and laughter, easily mistaken for screams later in the scene. In a desperate attempt to change channels from the news item about her, Muriel switches to a soft-porn dance program, further exciting her seducer. Having unzipped the beanbag rather than Muriel’s trousers, Bruce, in his attempt to take them off, overbalances onto a birdcage, which hurtles through the window.

• Muriel’s Wedding (1994) is an example of tragicomedy, a genre that combines, as the name suggests, elements of tragedy and comedy. This is evident in the clip when the comic fiasco in the apartment ends with Rhonda, suddenly paralysed, being rushed to hospital and Muriel waiting to hear her prognosis. Tragicomedies are sometimes referred to as dark comedies, but often have a happy or bittersweet ending.

• Muriel’s Wedding follows a universal 'ugly-duckling’ plot, whereby an unfairly treated person eventually finds admirers and their rightful position in the world. In the 1840s Hans Christian Anderson wrote a fairytale, The Ugly Duckling, about a swan that is born in the nest of a family of ducks and is treated as an outcast until he is finally accepted by birds of his own species. The ugly-duckling Muriel appears in this clip to have broken away from her family and to now be among friends.

• Toni Collette (1972–) is a highly regarded Australian actor who won the 1994 AFI Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role for her role as Muriel. Collette left the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) to debut in Spotswood (1992), a role that led to her nomination for an AFI Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. She was nominated for an Oscar in 2000 for The Sixth Sense (1999) and for BAFTA and Golden Globe awards for supporting actress in Little Miss Sunshine (2006).

• Rachel Griffiths (1968–) first appeared in television roles before launching her career in film as Rhonda in Muriel’s Wedding, for which she received an AFI Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (1994). In 1998–2002, Griffiths was nominated for four AFI awards, including for directing a short film. She continues to act in television series such as US series Six Feet Under (2001–05) for which she won an AFI International Award (2006).

• PJ Hogan (1962–) directed Muriel’s Wedding and wrote the screenplay. Muriel’s Wedding was nominated for seven AFI awards, including for Best Director and Best Screenplay, and won four, including Best Film. Hogan claims inspiration for the project from watching a bridal shop over the road from his favourite café when he was unemployed in 1988. Both Hogan and Collette were brought to the attention of Hollywood by Muriel’s Wedding and Hogan went on to direct My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) and Peter Pan (2003).

Education notes provided by The Learning Federation and Education Services Australia