Nick Cave’s grubby, gorgeous plunge into television
Australia’s Prince of Darkness has created television gold with The Death of Bunny Munro, a six-part series starring Matt Smith as a sex-addicted cosmetics salesman on a road trip with his nine-year-old son.
Sleazy, sexy, sad – of course it is: it’s a Nick Cave adaptation. The Death of Bunny Munro, based on Australia’s Prince of Darkness’s 2009 novel and streaming on Binge, is the most debased and affecting thing on television this year. So far, so Cave.
The brilliant Matt Smith (The Crown) plays Bunny, a Brighton-based travelling cosmetics salesman, sex addict, and general bacchanalian. He sweeps through the show in a ticky-tacky convertible, all seedy charm and noxious pheromones. Every sale ends with someone’s knickers on the lino. He is a beast, but Smith plays him with such lupine smoothness you almost forgive him. Almost.
When we meet Bunny, he’s in a grotty motel, enthusiastically being unfaithful to his wife, Libby (Sarah Greene, devastating). She rings in a panic about a fire on Brighton Pier; he fobs her off. Libby is prone to depression, and he simply cannot be bothered to deal with that right now. By the time he slinks home the next day, she has taken her life, leaving their nine-year-old son, Bunny Jr, alone.
Bunny Jr – Rafael Mathe, in the most heartbreaking child performance since Boy Swallows Universe – is everything his father isn’t: clever, tender, curious. He also suffers from chronic blepharitis, which makes him look permanently on the verge of tears; fitting, given the circumstances. He worships his father, even as Bunny immediately tries to dump him on Libby’s mother, Doris (Lindsay Duncan). She refuses, pointing out that the boy will only remind her of Bunny, whom she describes as “a pig”.
Who could argue? This is a man who we witness leaving his wife’s funeral mid-service to smoke a cigarette and masturbate in the toilets.
The wake, which one of Bunny’s friends refers to as an “after-party”, is predictably debauched: cocaine smeared across CDs, a woman wandering around in the nuddy. Social services arrive, appalled; this is clearly not a suitable environment for a child and they try to take the boy into care. Only here – perhaps out of wounded ego rather than anything resembling love – does Bunny decide to keep his son. And so the pair flee through a window and onto the open road.
The road trip, Bunny declares, is to teach his son “the trade”. He explains that being a travelling salesman isn’t about “shaking the tree” of the wealthy; it’s about fleecing the poor. Selling over-perfumed hand cream to women in council flats who buy tiny luxuries because they’ve been denied larger ones (and, in some cases, because they think Bunny is fit). It’s a bleak and grubby manifesto to hand a child.
The trip is also Bunny’s way of numbing grief beneath a haze of sex, booze and whatever else he can inhale. Flashbacks reveal his father was much the same, suggesting a long and illustrious dynasty of hereditary bastardry – while quietly hinting that Bunny is far less unfazed than he pretends. Whether the cycle can be broken is the show’s central question.
With respect to Cave, The Death of Bunny Munro actually transcends the source. It’s lushly shot, gorgeously acted, and soundtracked to perfection (obviously). No surprise, then, that Pete Jackson – the mind behind the underseen and astonishing Somewhere Boy – wrote it.
If Bunny Munro leaves you craving a father-son story that doesn’t involve cocaine or council estate grifts, Chris Hemsworth’s new documentary A Road Trip to Remember (Disney+) is your palate cleanser.
Normally, “celebrity takes ageing parent on emotional road trip” is a genre I rank somewhere between tax returns and laser hair removal, but this one is different. Even without Thor behind the wheel, this would be worth watching. Those who saw Hemsworth’s earlier series Limitless will remember his discovery that he carries a genetic predisposition to Alzheimer’s. Now his father, Craig, 71, has entered the early stages. Hemsworth teams up with psychologist Dr Suraj Samtani to explore whether revisiting the past can slow the cognitive slide, and the pair head off on a motorcycle road trip. Their first major stop is a meticulous recreation of the Hemsworth 1990s family home on the outskirts of Melbourne – rebuilt from a trove of photographs. Craig recalls the mundane with striking clarity: how chilly the house used to get, how he used to build toy aeroplanes for his kids. But he falters with the new, asking twice when his wife, Leonie, will be arriving. It’s a small, devastating moment that knocks the air out of you. For anyone who has watched a loved one fade to Alzheimer’s, it’s brutal viewing – emotional but never lugubrious. Impressively done.
Streaming free on SBS On Demand (and airing weekly on SBS from Sunday, December 7 at 8.30pm) is legendary documentary filmmaker Ken Burns’ decade-in-the-making opus The American Revolution. Written by Geoffrey C. Ward – who penned his breakthrough docuseries The Civil War – this six-part, 12-hour series sees the master of the slow zoom apply his trademark solemnity to a period that inconveniently predates photography. No matter: Burns compensates by recruiting what appears to be half of Hollywood to do the voiceovers — Kenneth Branagh, Claire Danes, Paul Giamatti, Domhnall Gleeson, Ethan Hawke, Edward Norton and Meryl Streep, to name a few.
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The Death of Bunny Munro, Binge
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