|
Introducing the Dwights, directed by Cherie Nowlan from a script by Keith Thompson, is a funny-sad, icky-sweet comedy of family dysfunction — a genre that seems to flourish in Australia, this film’s country of origin. The monstrous, needy matriarch of the Dwight clan, Jean, may be British, but she has assimilated, however miserably, into a familiar lower-middle-class Down Under milieu of dreamers and eccentrics.
Jean was once a semifamous nightclub comedian, and she fans the sputtering flame of her career at C-list nightclubs, where she is introduced as “clubland’s raunchiest homemaker” and tells broad, bad jokes about the uselessness of men. (“Having sex with a big bloke is like having a wardrobe fall on you in the middle of the night,” she observes.)
© The New York Times
