Aussie masculinity collides with medical reality in Plum

Plum ★★★½
ABC, Sunday 8.30pm

Rugby league has not been the most well-covered sport on screen. In Hollywood, baseball and boxing are the kings, with basketball and American football also producing their share of favourites. Worldwide, plenty of films and TV shows have been made about soccer, but depictions of the brutality of league have been few and far between – the Richard Harris film This Sporting Life and Australian efforts The Final Winter and Footy Legends among the notable exceptions.

Plum is the latest league-themed production, a well-mounted, high-class ABC production that is much closer to the bleak reflectiveness of The Final Winter than the joyous comedy of Footy Legends. But really, Plum defies parallels in the world of sporting drama, because its subject is not just the game of rugby league, but perhaps the most topical and urgent issue currently facing it, and indeed many other sports: the issue of head trauma and the long-term effects on sportspeople of decades of violent collisions.

Asher Keddie as Renee and Brendan Cowell as Peter Lum in Plum: Cowell knows his stuff.Credit: ABC

The title character is Peter “Plum” Lum, a retired league legend whose storied career with the Cronulla Sharks has made him local royalty. Pushing 50, Plum is suffering the various aches and pains unsurprising in one who put his body on the line on the field so many times – but otherwise he’s pretty content. Working as an aircraft tug driver, living with his girlfriend, kicking the footy with his son: life ain’t bad for Plum. Until … things start to happen. A fog in the brain, lapses in memory and hallucinations, with the crisis point arriving in the form of a seizure at work. Medical opinion is that Plum is suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a name that will be familiar to anyone who has been following the attempts by sporting bodies in recent years to address player safety.

A battle has begun for Plum: not only against the symptoms of an encroaching disease that has no cure, but against his own personality, forged in the furnace of traditional Aussie masculinity. Facing up to reality is the hardest thing of all, as he attempts to run and hide from the problem, but as he drives the people he loves away with him with his erratic – and sometimes violent – behaviour, the enormity of what he stands to lose becomes ever clearer.

Jemaine Clement and Asher Keddie in Plum: cringingly tragicomic.Credit: ABC

Plum is based on the novel of the same name by Brendan Cowell, who also wrote the TV series and plays the title role. Cowell brings a powerful authenticity to both script and performance, in terms of his well-established skill as an actor of rare talent, and as a bona fide real-life rugby league tragic (and Sharks fanatic). Cowell knows his stuff, and has always been one of this country’s best when it comes to portraying manhood with depth and complexity.

Here he beautifully embodies Plum’s inner torture, desperately wanting life to be as simple and serene as he thought it was, terrified by the changes in himself and by the thought that the game that’s been his lifelong passion might be the cause of his ultimate destruction. Without showiness or histrionics, Cowell conveys uncertainty, fear and the bullheaded stubbornness that is both easy to understand and heartbreaking to observe.

Cowell is backed up by a classy supporting cast, particularly Asher Keddie as Plum’s ex-wife, Renee, whose insistence on inserting herself into her ex’s life whenever she can may be well-meaning, but is driving said ex nuts. There’s also the splendid Jemaine Clement in a cringingly tragicomic role as Keddie’s new husband, Oliver.

It’s a beautifully shot and directed series, with visuals both sumptuous and jarring: medical scenes capture the bewilderment and tension of being put through the diagnostic wringer, while the shots of footballing action capture the primal artistry and savage beauty of rugby league, simultaneously generating stomach-churning menace by highlighting the awful consequences we know will be the result of the blood-stirring hits.

At times, Plum skirts the fringes of heavy-handedness, coming as it does with a definite and serious message about a pressing public health issue. But for the most part, it illuminates that message with a wonderfully human story about one man stricken with an affliction he doesn’t understand, fighting his own brain and his own identity to regain a life.

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