The Castle was the first feature film production from Working Dog Productions, who had just had success with the television news satire Frontline. They self-funded the production for $750,000 AUD (around $500,000 USD), wrote it in two weeks, and shot it in the aforementioned eleven days on Super 16mm. Rob Sitch directed and co-wrote with fellow Working Dog members Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, and Jane Kennedy. Sitch told IndieWire about their intentions: "The Castle is a very simple film and we deliberately wrote it like that. It's a kid remembering things: my dad is big; my dad is this; my family was this; my house is the best house. And so you don't move the camera for that. You just go, 'this is my house' that's the way kids tell stories. . . . When you don't have a lot of money, the only thing you have is scriptwriting."
The story is told with absolute naiveté by the youngest member of the Kerrigan family, Dale (Stephen Curry), who introduces the colorful figures of his bombastic tow-truck driving dad Darryl (Michael Caton), his sweet mother Sal (Anne Tenney), brothers Steve (Anthony Simcoe) and Wayne (Wayne Hope), and sister Tracey (Sophie Lee). Darryl is the idiosyncratic center of the Kerrigans, a mustachioed autodidact who thinks he knows the value of every object in the classified ads that his son Steve reads to him. If he especially admires an object, Darryl will send it "straight to the pool room", which has become an oft-quoted phrase in Australia.
Wayne is in prison for armed robbery, though they know his heart is in the right place. Tracey is Darryl's favorite kid, since she was the only one to graduate school (a beautician course) and was recently married to a kickboxing jock (played by Eric Bana in his first feature). They all make their home at a jerry-rigged contraption that is literally right next to an airport and looming power lines, disadvantages that Darryl spins as conveniences, that is until he is ordered to sell his house via "compulsory acquisition" (Australia's version of eminent domain). Outraged and befuddled, he hires an overwhelmed and unqualified lawyer, the perpetually disheveled Dennis Denuto (Tiriel Mora) to plead his case. Despite a valiant attempt to argue that "the vibe of the thing" is what should sway the judge, it will take a miracle for Darryl to keep his castle.
It is the warmth of the ensemble cast that carries the film through, led by Michael Caton, whose Droopy Dog jowels undergird his exquisitely funny stare of dumbfounded shock whenever he is proven wrong (which is often). This plays beautifully against Mora's stoop-shouldered and exhausted performance as Denuto - who goes in to any meeting expecting to be wrong. They are very funny together, especially in the increasingly absurd courtroom scenes, in which Denuto stalls and vamps while Darryl gives him a thumbs up. These are characters which could very easily have slid into caricature and insult, but the Working Dog team clearly loves these characters, and they are written and performed with empathy.
The most moving scenes are the simple ones, Wayne expressing his desire to come home from jail, or their mother Sal recounting the first time she met Darryl, and using that loving memory as inspiration to stand their ground against the government, who soon start sending pressure to sell in the form of broken windows and not-so-veiled threats. This hit a chord with local audiences, calling back to the post-WWII Australian Dream of home ownership. In Senses of Cinema Matthew J. Mason defines the "Australian Dream" as centering "on ownership of a detached house on a fenced-off block of land. In a nation principally populated by those of a migrant background, home ownership has developed an integral importance as the ultimate reflection of the opportunity presented by a new start in Australia."
The Castle ends on an inspirational note, with the Kerrigans digging in their foothold in that new Australia, though newly aware of how quickly it could be taken away. Somehow, despite it all, they remain delightfully, irreducibly themselves.
By R. Emmet Sweeney
