A popular and critically acclaimed novel somehow just doesn’t make it to the screen in Dirt Music, an Outback tale about people with broken lives trying to find romance.
It’s the slushy sort of story often associated with women’s fiction – chick lit, if you like. Georgia (Kelly Macdonald) is out swimming naked in the sea one hot, hot night when she spies a boat stealing crayfish from her husband’s fishing grounds. She says nothing but the poacher sees her and they exchange a couple of meaningless words and some more meaningful looks. Sparks would fly if she weren’t so damp.
Some days later they do, when Georgia’s car breaks down and Luther (Garrett Hedlund) stops to help her out. A gauzy romance gets going, immediately hitting impediments in the shape of her past, Luther’s past and the past of her husband – older, brusque Jim (David Wenham), the Ocker Aussie incarnate.
Georgia is an outsider, mostly ignored by the rest of this close-knit town, who seem inordinately standoffish by Australian standards. As for Luther, he’s the troubled warrior-poet with tousled hair and a shirt itching to be taken off. He lives in a rude wooden shack, reads books by authors like Hemingway and reckons the crayfish he liberates are in common ownership. Jim is obviously the villain of this piece. The husband who doesn’t understand his younger wife, the man’s man who’d rather be fishing than emoting. Together Jim and Georgia are raising his kids from a previous relationship.
Previous relationships hover over this movie and are there to cast a shadow, shapes from the past influencing the present. We learn that Luther had a brother, Darkie (George Mason), who had a pretty wife, Sal (Julia Stone), and in tender flashbacks we see all three making music together, the plain old “dirt music” that can be sung on a verandah with a guitar and willing singers (Stone, whose day job is folk music, has a great voice).
But Darkie and Sal died. How they connect up with the present and the people in it is the film’s mission – not quite accomplished.
The actors. Hedlund first, a man who always appears to be apologising for being handsome, has undoubtedly been cast on account of his looks. He’s a fine, if remote Luther – that said everyone in this movie is remote. Macdonald, a shopgirl when she was cast in Trainspotting all those years ago, acts Hedlund off the screen, but in a way that spares his blushes. The standout is David Wenham, whose Jim sneaks up on the outside rail as the misunderstood ogre who’s actually got more depth and maturity, compassion and good sense than either of the others. Jim steps up to help Georgia find her lover when he goes missing. Because? Because he knows what pain lurks in her heart. Because? No more.
This film has been in the works for so long that Heath Ledger was originally slated to be in it. But he died in 2008. Phillip Noyce was to direct, from a screenplay by Justin Monjo. Instead it’s Gregor Jordan with Jack Thorne doing the adaptation. Yes, Jack “can do no wrong” Thorne, the writer whose projects fill British TV screens, cinemas and West End theatres.
God knows what’s gone wrong here because it’s really hard to put a finger on what Dirt Music needs. More explanation up front as to who everyone is and why Georgia is seen as an outsider? A different pace of editing? Or another go at Tim Winton’s original novel, in an attempt to streamline 500 pages of layers and complexity?
So much back story comes tumbling out towards the end that it negates almost everything we’ve seen up to that point. What? Who? Why? The result is a movie that sparks into life, stalls and then gets going again, repeatedly. Noyce apparently walked away because he felt the “poetry of the novel” wasn’t coming over in Monjo’s adaptation. You can see what was worrying him. Jordan and Thorne’s take on the same raw material is valiant and the actors give it their best shot. It’s so nearly there.
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
