John Collee’s seven-part adaptation is warmly acted and shot in hard Queensland light, with two fine boys at its centre. It then piles more grief, crime and whimsy on top of them than seven hours can hold. Worth it for the brothers; brace for the lurches.
John Collee’s seven-part adaptation of Trent Dalton’s novel takes a boy from a Brisbane suburb in the mid-1980s and hands him a brother who does not speak, a mother a few months off heroin, a stepfather who sells it, and a babysitter who has done time for murder. Out of this it tries to make something hopeful, and for long stretches it does. Boy Swallows Universe is generous, loud and often lovely, and it is also far too much. Its best scenes are two boys alone in a room; its worst are the ones that keep interrupting them.
The boys are the reason to watch. Felix Cameron plays Eli as a chatterer, a child who has worked out that if he keeps talking the adults cannot lie to him for long, and he can switch from cheek to terror in the space of a line. Lee Tiger Halley has the harder job as Gus, who says nothing for most of the series and writes his sentences in the air for Eli to read back, and he does it with a stillness that never reads as blankness. When the two of them crouch in the hidden room behind the wardrobe and the disconnected red telephone starts to ring, we were more frightened and more moved than we had expected to be, because the show had already made us believe they only had each other.
The adults are a mixed crowd, as the script intends. Phoebe Tonkin gives Frances a brittle, hopeful energy, a woman counting her clean days and knowing who is in the next room. Ben O’Toole’s Teddy Callis, the mate with the truck, is the kind of man you would not leave alone with your dog. Haiha Le plays the supplier Bich Dang with a politeness that chills, Zachary Wan plays a schoolboy already too comfortable with the family trade, and Deborah Mailman, as the school counsellor Poppy Birkbeck, is one of the few adults who listens to Eli rather than talking at him.
It looks terrific. Shelley Farthing-Dawe and Mark Wareham shoot the suburb in flat, saturated sunlight, so that even the ugliest fibro house looks like it is on holiday, and keep the hidden room and the city at night in hard, coloured shadow. Michelle McGahey’s production design gets the brown lounge, the patterned wallpaper and the fridge full of beer exactly right. Kerry Thompson puts the men in short shorts and singlets and the boys in school uniforms a size too large. Gabriel Mounsey and Johnny Klimek’s score is at its best when it stays small, a few notes under a conversation, and at its worst when it swells to tell us a sad scene is sad.
The trouble is volume. Every episode adds another blow to the family: a disappearance, an arrest, a beating, an illness, a hand that is not what it was. Each one on its own is handled with care. Together they begin to feel like a schedule. Somewhere in the fifth episode we noticed we had stopped flinching, and then we were annoyed with the series for making us numb to things that ought to hurt. The tone swings as hard as the plot does, from dream sequences and a comic subplot about Eloise Rothfield’s Shelly Huffman to scenes of real brutality, sometimes within the same ten minutes. Three directors, Bharat Nalluri, Jocelyn Moorhouse and Kim Mordaunt, share the episodes, and the joins show.
The story jumps forward in time in its second half, and the series does not quite survive the jump. The final episode in particular tries to tie off every thread with a flourish, and the flourish is not earned. We will not describe it, except to say that a show which spent six hours teaching us that life in this suburb does not resolve itself then spends one hour resolving it.
As a drama about brothers it is as good as anything of its kind in years. As a crime thriller, a coming-of-age story, a fable and a family weepie, all of which it also wants to be, it keeps tripping over its own feet. See it for Cameron and Halley, take it one episode at a time rather than in a weekend, and forgive the last hour if you can. It carries a 15 certificate and earns it.
