Matt Shea
RubySoho
Morgan Bell
Cibbuano
David O'Connell
Mountain Fog
The Coca Cola Kid
May 20th 2009 02:35
Matt Shea is a guest writer on 20/20 Filmsight, and has his own excellent movie review site at Screen Trek.
It’s interesting to consider what producers Sylvie Le Clezio and David Roe were aiming for when they decided to make “The Coca-Cola Kid.” Linking a Frank Moorhouse collection of short stories together to create a coherent screenplay and then let it be cast to screen by renegade Yugoslavian director Dusan Makavejev was an exercise of admirable ambition, to say the least. The resultant film turned out to be an inspired mess, as something that would have fit beautifully into a coffee house pitch was poured out onto the screen like a lumpy pancake batter.
In “The Coca-Cola Kid”, Eric Roberts plays Becker, an aggressive young marketing executive for the Coca-Cola Company, who has been despatched to Australia to sniff out any holes that might exist in the soft drink giant’s Down Under market. Sure enough, Becker quickly identifies the tiny country town of Anderson Valley as the blank spot on Coke’s radar. Unfortunately, his moves to plug the gap brings him up against a low-key but formidable adversary, T. George McDowell (Bill Kerr), whose home-grown soda has cornered the market in this little nook of the country. Becker's attempts to strong-arm McDowell into accepting Coke’s terms become complicated for the brash American when he slowly starts falling for both the laid back charms of Australian life as well as the affections of Terri (Greta Scacchi), a skittish Anderson Valley native who he has hired as his secretary.
The deficiencies of “The Coca-Cola Kid” begin with the script provided by Frank Moorhouse. Moorhouse was working from two of his own books titled “The Americans, Baby” and “The Electrical Experience”, both of which were collections of short stories that featured the same characters, but in different tales and without a linear narrative. It’s no surprise then that the screenplay Moorhouse produced was bursting with great ideas, but lacking in a dominant and driving narrative. Becker and McDowell’s conflict, which should take centre spot in the story, is constantly undermined by a hodgepodge of extraneous characters and meandering scenes.
Not helping is the awkward casting of Eric Roberts as Becker. Roberts is in fact often fascinating to watch, but his interpretation of the part is skewed away from the comedy and towards the intense, placing him in stark and sometimes dark contrast with the rest of the cast. It affects the tone of the picture and also strips the already underwritten relationship between him and Terri of all logic and chemistry. In this respect, Makavejev perhaps needs to take some of the blame also, as his apparent unwillingness to rein Roberts in starts to strip Becker of any real qualities whatsoever. It’s a shame, because at certain points both director and actor illustrate a considerable flair for comic timing.
Indeed, despite the litany of poor decisions that encompasses “The Coca-Cola Kid”, the film isn’t without its clutch of charms. Dean Semler, a cinematographer who specialises in providing pretty pictures for big budget misses, once again frames things beautifully in “The Coca-Cola Kid”. Semler’s camera sweeps up the open landscapes between being intimate but unobtrusive during the interior scenes. Also, other than Roberts, the film benefits from a strong cast, including the inscrutable Bill Kerr as T. George McDowell and an outrageously attractive Gretta Scacchi as Terri. Elsewhere, “The Coca-Cola Kid” is the proud purveyor of one of the most annoyingly catchy musical themes ever recorded, courtesy of Tim Finn (who, along with Paul Hester, has a small role in the film).
The whole enterprise adds up to being one of the most uneven films imaginable; a collection of ideas that was never given any proper direction by a script so obsessed with the gag that it forgets the plot. It’s undeniable that the “The Coca-Cola Kid” has a number of quirky and enjoyable moments, but it’s the filmmakers’ decision to let these very elements dominate proceedings that derails the final product, thus creating a flawed and ultimately unsatisfying film.
*this image is from shillPages.
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Comment by GlenB
Raw Fish
I have since seen the film and now understand the reference.
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