Working Dog tackles men's business with a smile

FIFTEEN years after The Castle and 12 years after The Dish, the Working Dog team has come up with another Aussie comedy - this time a romantic one.

Josh Lawson

FIFTEEN years after The Castle and 12 years after The Dish, the Working Dog team has come up with another Australian comedy - this time a romantic one.

And being a Working Dog production, what sets it apart from other romantic comedies? A certain boldness, unusual characters, an offbeat plot, a whimsical attitude to the follies and fatuities of the world? Not at all.

Any Questions for Ben?, directed by Rob Sitch (who wrote the screenplay with Santo Cilauro and Tom Gleisner), couldn't be more conventional. It's big, glossy and warm-hearted and presses all the standard buttons. If it weren't for all those helicopter shots of Melbourne's skyline we could be forgiven for thinking that Any Questions for Ben? is the latest big-studio crowd-pleaser from Hollywood, with, let's say, Justin Timberlake and Jennifer Aniston.

None of this intended as criticism. I enjoyed it thoroughly. As my companion remarked, it's one of the few romantic comedies that are genuinely funny and genuinely romantic. And it looks great: the screen seems to be constantly filled with close-ups of exuberant and beautiful female faces, and the Working Dog boys have gone to great trouble to find attractive locations around Melbourne, which couldn't have been easy (no, I didn't mean that, Melbourne being one of my favourite cities and overdue for glamorous promotion after the shabby treatment it received in On the Beach).

The screenplay has lots of good lines, and there's a serious message (I think) aimed at today's generation of young, commitment-shy males. If any young commitment-shy male is reading this he should hurry along to see Sitch's film with his girlfriend. I predict it will do much for the institution of marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and possibly for the other kind as well.

Ben (Josh Lawson) is a 27-year-old advertising whiz undergoing a midlife crisis. That may seem early for a midlife crisis, but Ben lives in the fast lane and success has always come easily. He's starting a new job (his 10th in seven years, as a title points out) and moving into a new apartment (his seventh in five years). How many girlfriends he's had is not specified. His long-standing, on-again-off-again girlfriend Alex (Rachael Taylor) has more or less given up on him. Otherwise Ben has it all: big money, success, admiring friends in a world of partying and fashionable eateries.

When his firm sponsors the Australian Open tennis championships Ben gets to meet a sexy Russian tennis star, Katarina (Liliya May), whose apartment, with even more spectacular views than Ben's, makes a fine setting for seduction. (Katarina loses her big match next morning, dropping to 16th in the world tennis rankings; Ben is blamed.)

It takes Ben a lot longer than the audience to realise something is missing in his life. What can it be? His dad (Rob Carlton) sells caravans and doesn't much care for Ben's arcane world of target marketing, brand ambassadors and product repositioning. When his flatmate Nick (Daniel Henshall) and their friend Emily (Felicity Ward) decide to get married and settle down, Ben doesn't get it. Settle down? Ben can't even bring himself to send an email to Alex when she's posted abroad. His plans for overseas trips are constantly deferred.

The guy is a hopeless ditherer. Invited to speak at a careers night at his old school, he parrots a lot of flim-flam. The other speakers are eagerly questioned by the audience but not Ben. As he confesses to Nick and his friend Sam (Lachy Hulme): "I feel I'm doing everything but achieving nothing."

Lawson has a boyish face marked by good humour and a touch of pugnacity and makes a very likeable Ben. Taylor was in Red Dog and I must have seen her in Transformers; I'd say she's as beautiful as anyone in movies, which makes you wonder why she's put up with Ben for so long.

Of course the ending is never in doubt. But waiting for the inevitable somehow makes it more satisfying when it comes. The surprise in this lovely comedy is that it succeeds so well with its predictable plot and without resort to the crass, the crude, the excessive. I don't think anyone uses a four-letter word. And when Ben's final words are spoken in Arabic (there's a good reason, of course) we know we're in special territory. Sitch comes down on the side of traditional family values in a world marked by greed, moral emptiness and materialism. Come to think of it, he did much the same in The Castle.

Any Questions for Ben? (M)
4 stars
National release