The Dish Review
by Tim Wick
Oh please let this be a good sign.
As I contemplate the films I saw last year, I continue to marvel at the sub
standard movie year we witnessed in 2000. 2002 could easily be more of the
same as a writers strike looms on the horizon that could shut down many film
productions just as they get going. 2001, on the other hand might be a good
year after all.
In April 1999, I saw a little film that set the tone for the rest of they
year. You might remember it - it was called The Matrix. For the next 12
months, I watched more great films than I could remember having seen in a
long time. My enjoyment stretched into the next year as I rented those I'd
missed and purchased those I could not live without. Despite some late
season gems, my time in the movie theatre yielded a lot of average stuff.
But here it is April 2001 and I just got to watch The Dish - a movie that
is nothing like The Matrix but could (if one believes in such things)
portend great things to come.
I was alive when we landed on the moon. I hadn't yet reached my 2nd
birthday, but I was alive when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin truly went
where no-one had gone before. Because of something I had no control over, I
missed one of the defining moments of our history as a species. Why did we
land on the moon? Because we wanted to see if we could. The whole world
held it's breath as Armstrong stepped out of the LEM that day because it
changed our ideas of what we were capable of.
This movie is about one little corner of the world that made it possible for
the rest of the world to watch.
A radar dish located in Parks, Australia was responsible for broadcasting
many of the communications between the Astronauts and the world. As
described in this film, if the Earth is a basketball, you need two valves on
opposite sides to keep in constant contact with Apollo 11 because at any
given time, one of them won't be able to point in the direction of the
capsule. Parks was part of valve #2 along with several other dishes in
Australia. Their dish was primary because it was larger than any other dish
in the Southern hemisphere and because it could broadcast TV pictures.
Of course what we see in the film is a romanticized view of the role this
Dish played in world history, but I'm not going to speculate on what is
truth and what is fiction. The point is that the film was so engaging that
nothing of such trivial importance as the truth is worth thinking about.
I often wonder if the reason we see so few Australian films in the US is
because they just make a whole slew of bad ones or if it's because they make
so many that are better than the US. In recent years, Australia has
produced Muriel's Wedding, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Strictly
Ballroom. I own all three films. They all share a gift for creating
quirky characters that are funny because they are just the slightest bit
different from everyone around them. The characters in The Dish are the
same fun mix of people who are just one tick away from being normal.
The film excels when it shows how these quirky people are so engulfed in
becoming a part of history. As the real world did, every one of them
becomes silent when Apollo 11 blasts off. The film doesn't gloss over this,
but rather it slows itself down to remind us that everyone on Earth could
think of almost nothing else. Armstrong and Aldrin were all anyone could
talk about and for a brief moment, the world forgot about all it's petty
bickering to watch.
So, too, do the characters in this film. Even the mayors daughter, who
feigns indifference, is watching the moon landing in enraptured silence.
Although these moments do not make the movie, they are what make the movie
real. In most American comedies, these moments would have been punctuated
by wacky jokes when those jokes would have been out of place. This film
remembers that the best comedy is a comedy that knows when it shouldn't be
funny.
The cast, who aside from Sam Neill are actors most Americans wouldn't know,
do a great job creating a town of individual characters all caught up in the
role they are about to play. Neill plays Cliff, the director of the
satellite dish and it's crew. He sums up his excitement when he tells one
of his crew that this one event is science's chance to be daring. Later,
when another of his crew is asked why, if we know everything about the moon
already, do we need to land there, Cliff responds that the one thing we
don't know is if we can actually do it. To Cliff, and to us, the moon
landing is about achieving that which is unachievable. As a good friend of
mine has observed, we had no business going to the moon with the technology
we had at the time and we did it anyway.
For some reason, the spirit of exploration died with the lunar landing. We
as a planet came to the conclusion that there was nothing left to conquer.
What a pity.
The Dish is a wonderful journey into a world that we forgot all too quickly.
It is also the first truly exceptional film I have seen this year. Enjoy
it.
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