What a mess. The Dressmaker either forgets that it’s supposed to be a tragedy, or forgets it’s supposed to be a comedy, but the tonally inconsistent and random events here play havoc with the narrative thrust, whatever that might be.
Tilly Dunnage (Winslet) is the titular dressmaker returning from the fashion world of 1950s Paris to the Aussie backwater town of her childhood to plot her revenge on those who forced her out the insular community when she was just a child. It seems she was held responsible for a tragic accident that befell one of the town’s kids and she’s about the show the religious, spiteful, and downright nasty townsfolk who’s boss. But her glamourous designs impress have a profound effect on the women of the town…
Or something. Adapted from Rosalie Ham’s novel, The Dressmaker is a season’s worth of soap opera (with flourishes of a Western) crammed into two hours without rhyme or reason. The problems begin in the opening exchanges with director Jocelyn Moorhouse (How To Make An American Quilt) concentrating on getting through Tilly’s sizeable backstory with clumsy expositional dialogue, all the while casting the net wide to incorporate as much as she can about all the town’s characters: pious, hunchbacked chemists, disgruntled teachers (Kerry Fox), horny shop assistants, cross-dressing police (Weaving), and cheating husbands among them. The result is scattershot storytelling where nothing sticks - The Dressmaker might be awash with idiosyncratic characters but they have no story.
And there’s no follow through on anything with scenes dropped in willy-nilly and played out with characters of little or no consistency. The townsfolk are at first wary of Tilly’s return, then suddenly welcome her with open arms, then shun her for reasons that are unclear. Then a rival dressmaker is employed… for some reason. An unrecognisable Judy Davis, wonderful as Tilly’s reclusive, batty mother, is given different motives depending on what scene she’s in. And on and on this goes.
The romance with Liam Hensworth wanders in from nowhere, ends prematurely and seems only to exist to slip the ripped actor in his boxers into the trailer (and is just as gratuitous as the Alice Eve/Star Trek scene). Other little comic and romantic subplots are shoehorned in and have little to do with the narrative thrust, which is supposed to be about Tilly seeking revenge on those that wronged her. But this is forgotten about very quickly after the first act.
A terrible mess.