By Karl Quinn
He Ain’t Heavy ★★★½
(MA 15+) 103 minutes
In production terms, He Ain’t Heavy is ripped straight from the low-budget first-time filmmaker’s handbook: one location (an unrenovated 1960s house in rural WA), a small cast (real-life mother and daughter Greta Scacchi and Leila George, and rising star Sam Corlett), and a tight script. But what it lacks in scale it more than makes up for in heart and craft.
Written and directed by David Vincent Smith, the film is “based on a true story”. That phrase, of course, allows for a multitude of sins, or at least variations. In this case, the truth behind the fiction is circumstantial rather than actual.
Greta Scacchi (centre) as Bev, with Leila George as Jade and Sam Corlett as Max.Credit: David Dare Parker
The film opens with Jade (George) coming home to a scene whose horrors, we immediately grasp, are all too familiar. Her drug-addict brother Max (Corlett) is on the rampage, banging on the front door of the family home, drawing distressed neighbours out to demand “this has to stop”. Meanwhile, the siblings’ mother Bev (Scacchi) is sitting in the kitchen, eating her dinner and watching telly, ignoring the noise and blithely pretending nothing is going on.
Smith says the real-life spur to this scenario was his inability to deal with his own brother’s addiction and erratic behaviour. “I was making it up as I went along, and my own life was suffering as a result. I couldn’t do it any more. What could I do?”
His answer was radical. “I could kidnap him. Take him out to the desert, throw away the car keys and resolve this once and for all.”
Sam Corlett as Max in He Ain’t HeavyCredit: David Dare Parker
Thankfully, that was purely an act of imagination. But it was also the starting point for He Ain’t Heavy (which arrives via a proof-of-concept short, I’m Not Hurting You, in 2019).
Jade does kidnap her brother, luring him to the home of their late grandparents on the pretext that she needs help getting it ready for sale. She’s placed a takeaway drink cup in the console between them in the car, knowing he’ll take it. It’s drugged, of course. His selfishness is his undoing and, she hopes, her route to saving him.
In the house, she locks him in a bedroom, its door padlocked in three places, its window barred. It’s a prefigurement of his inevitable and more permanent destination if he doesn’t clean up.
He’s incapable of doing it himself, so Jade has taken on his rehab on as her mission, and her salvation. She’s 30, all her friends are getting married, having babies, travelling. She can’t keep putting her life on hold for her brother, no matter how much she loves him.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports that one in 10 people aged over 14 was a victim of an illicit drug-related incident (experiencing verbal abuse, physical abuse or being put in fear) in 2022-23. That makes this well-acted, tightly woven film both intensely personal and broadly public.
For those who believe Australian cinema is too dark, too small, too focused on grim reality rather than the glittery stuff of the silver screen, He Ain’t Heavy will serve as proof. And for those who believe our cinema should reflect the reality of the world in which we live, it will do exactly the same.
He Ain’t Heavy is released in cinemas on October 17.
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