Muriel’s Wedding: 'You're all useless'

The scene establishes a real sense of the family’s poisoned dynamics, the patriarchal tyranny of the 'great man’, his corrupt private and public personas, and the contempt with which he treats his 'loved’ ones. The addition of other races at the table allows Hogan to show Bill’s cultural insensitivity, and the stupidity of Deirdre, the woman he is having an affair with. It’s an extremely jaundiced picture of a certain kind of Australian male, and the effect they have on their loved ones.

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 Bill Heslop (Bill Hunter), his family, a Japanese property developer called Victor and Victor’s interpreter in a Chinese restaurant. Bill dominates the conversation by bragging of his influence and political aspirations before turning on daughter Muriel (Toni Collette), contrasting her with Victor, who was a millionaire at age 19. While her mother congratulates Muriel on getting a job interview, Bill expands his criticisms to all of the children, labelling them as 'useless no-hopers’. Deirdre Chambers, a 'beauty consultant’, appears and takes over the conversation.

Educational value points

• This clip is from Muriel’s Wedding (1994), a character-driven tragicomedy. Character-driven films place emphasis on dialogue and personal choice, relying on a strong protagonist and other rounded and dynamic characters to drive the action and drama. Tragicomedy, also referred to as dark comedy, combines humour with sad and painful experiences. Although not evident in this clip, tragicomedies such as Muriel’s Wedding generally have happy or bittersweet endings.

• The overbearing, boorish character of Bill Heslop and the cowed behaviour of his family are the focus of this scene. Bill’s dialogue shifts from displays of his own importance, to ruthless derision of his family – whom he describes with the particularly Australian idiomatic term 'no-hopers’ – to public humiliation of Muriel, whom he singles out for particular criticism.

• Bill portrays the 'ugly Australian’, controlling, self-opinionated and culturally insensitive. He patronises his Japanese guests, introduces them as Chinese and refers to the Chinese owner of the restaurant not by his own name but as Charlie Chan – a fictional Chinese–American screen detective from the 1920s and 30s.

• Muriel’s Wedding follows a universal 'ugly-duckling’ plot, whereby an unfairly treated person eventually finds admirers and their rightful position in the world. To help achieve this transformation on the screen the filmmakers make gradual alterations to Muriel’s hair, clothes, speech, stance and expressions as the film progresses.

• Bill’s demeaning of his entire family and the negative effect this has on their personalities comes across strongly in this scene in which Betty (Bill’s wife) and their children are shown to be silent, downcast and generally cowed by Bill’s bitter recriminations. By contrast, Betty is genuinely pleased and encouraging of Muriel when she announces that she has a job interview, but cannot convince her husband to be equally supportive.

• The exaggerated characterisations in Muriel’s Wedding, seen in Bill Heslop’s characterisation in this scene, are comparable with characters in other distinctively Australian feature films such as Strictly Ballroom (1992), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and The Castle (1997), and television series such as Kath and Kim (2002–), as well as actor Barry Humphries’s theatrical personas Dama Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson.

• Bill Hunter (1940–) is an experienced Australian actor who began his career as an extra in The Shiralee (1957) and was a swimming double in On the Beach (1957). Since then he has worked in approximately 100 television and film productions including Gallipoli (1981), Strictly Ballroom (1992) and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), which was filmed in the same year as Muriel’s Wedding.

• Toni Collette (1972–) is a highly regarded Australian actor who won the 1994 AFI Award for Best Actress in a Lead Role for playing 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 and nominated for BAFTA and Golden Globe awards for supporting actress in Little Miss Sunshine (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 for 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