Starring: Anthony LaPaglia, Julia Blake, John Clarke, Justine Clarke, Donal Forde, and Indiana Crowther
Distributor: Madman Entertainment
Runtime: 110 mins. Reviewed in Apr 2016
| 
| 
This is a beautiful, gentle Australian film about a lonely man, who needs a fresh purpose in life. A chance occurrence gives him an opportunity for that to happen.
Frank Mollard (Anthony LaPaglia) is an Adelaide real-estate agent, who doesn’t care a lot about his clients, or the properties he is supposed to sell. He is recently divorced from his wife, Wendy (Justine Clarke), and he is alienated from his son, Frank Jr. (Indiana Crowther). He doesn’t worry about what he says, and he finds it hard to express his feelings.
One day, he receives a phone call from an elderly widower, Sarah (Julia Blake), who carries on a conversation with him as if she is his mother. Sarah has mis-dialled – Frank’s mother died a year before – but her wrong number leads to an unpredictable friendship. Depressed, and in search of a purpose in life, Frank follows up the phone call and develops a relationship with Sarah. He calls on her at her home, shares tea and dinner with her, and her son, Damien (Donal Forde), and reaches out to Sarah as a surrogate mother. He found his phone conversation with her oddly comforting.
At work, Frank gets on reasonably well with his acerbic boss, Phillip (John Clarke), but he is frustrated that he is asked to sell so many properties belonging to those who have been recently deceased, or are soon to die. He has trouble keeping up with what he is routinely asked to do. Sarah gives him new ways to look at life, and to reassess why he is feeling the way he is.
The film is basically a dramatic character study of Frank, with Sarah being the mechanism for reassessment by Frank of his purpose in life. Sarah realises what Frank is doing and tells him that he must not relate to her as if she is family, when she isn’t, but Frank doesn’t stop. He wants a relationship with Sarah. He comes to care deeply when she gets sick, and Sarah helps him re-discover the humanity he thought he had lost.
The title of the movie refers to action in a Month of Sundays or 30 days, but the meaning of the title also subtly suggests outcomes that are ordinarily not expected to eventuate. Things occur by chance in this movie, and they are contrived cleverly to fit a convenient plot-line.
LaPaglia gives an outstanding portrayal of a man in a mid-life crisis, who takes the opportunity to do something about his life and the way he is feeling. The acting by the entire cast is excellent, and John Clarke as Frank’s boss, nicely projects his well-known acting style. Actors and the film’s cinematography capture personal moments poignantly and intimately. The script is insightful and witty, and the direction is both understated and assured.
The movie offers a thoroughly enjoyable, home-grown slice of Australian life that is very moving, and its portrayal of goodness is inspiring. Phillip visits his ageing father, for example, and Frank takes Sarah along to bring her special, caring style of comfort to Phillip’s father as well.
The film itself covers a diversity of themes in a sensitive, warm-hearted way. They range from family affection and attachment, joy, ageing, insecurity, separation, and grief, all the way to acts of natural kindness, telling gestures of humanity, and finding ways to cope with death. The film projects the surface message that “everyone should have a second chance”, but it deals with the ups and downs of life much more insightfully, and dramatically than such a phrase suggests. And it does so in a rich and non-threatening way.
12 Random Films…
