Film review: Ruben Guthrie, starring Patrick Brammall, set to divide audiences with tale of alcoholism

REVIEW: THERE can be no doubting Ruben Guthrie, starring Patrick Brammall, will divide Australian audiences.

Ruben Guthrie (MA15+)

Director: Brendan Cowell (feature debut)

Starring: Patrick Brammall, Abbey Lee, Harriet Dyer, Robyn Nevin, Jack Thompson, Alex Dimitriades

Rating: **

There can be no doubting Ruben Guthrie will be dividing audiences wherever it plays.

Conquering audiences, however, will remain beyond the scope of this irksomely uneven Australian feature.

DYSFUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIP: Patrick Brammall on alcoholism

CHANGE OF SCENE: Abbey Lee’s big acting gamble

Feature debut ... Abbey Lee and Patrick Brammall on the set of Ruben Guthrie with director Brendan Cowell.

Such a problem is bound to happen when your lead character holds a trifecta of traits (he works in advertising, has an alcohol problem, and is an absolute a---hole) that do not exactly inspire warm affection in any viewer.

Patrick Brammall plays Ruben, a slick, self-obsessed adman whose perpetually party-harder lifestyle has just about got the better of him.

After nearly accidentally killing himself by impulsively jumping off the roof of his house, Ruben goes from man of the hour (he’d just won an important campaign award) to a man running out of time.

Love gone wrong ... Patrick Brammall and Abbey Lee in Ruben Guthrie.

Without going into much further detail, Ruben has one year to win back the hand of his estranged Euro-supermodel girlfriend Zoya (Abbey Lee), primarily by getting off the grog and getting himself a life.

Once the base logistics of Ruben’s quest are bedded down — he starts attending (and up-ending) local AA meetings, and eventually turns his back on his career — the film lapses into a stop-start rhythm that can get quite annoying.

It’s a worry ... Ruben Guthrie (Patrick Brammall) just can’t lay off the booze.

The script’s origins as a stage play (first-time director Brendan Cowell wrote it almost a decade ago) are also a hindrance.

While the darker, dramatic components of the tale often surge with deceptive strength and insight, Cowell’s attempts to fuse them with an indulgent, not-so-funny comedy of (bad) manners cancels out some good work.

If the movie stops short of devolving into a total feelbad folly, it is all due to the fearlessly committed performance of Patrick Brammall in the title role.

It is his job throughout to sell us some semi-damaged goods with his character, and there are occasions where he comes mighty close to suddenly making an impossible turnaround in quality possible.

Give Brammall a better-written role in more consistent circumstances, and he could be anything.