Royal Hotel, The (Kitty Green, 2023) wr. Kitty Green & Oscar Redding, prod. Emile Sherman, Iain Canning, Liz Watts, dp Michael Latham; Julia Garner, Jessica Henwick, Hugo Weaving, Toby Wallace; SA
Clarke:
Green’s latest, The Royal Hotel, is another #MeToo film, and another story throwing young female characters into a sexist, aggressive environment.
“No agenda!” says Green. “But I always end up there somehow.” The Royal Hotel is the story of two American [Canadian!] gap year backpackers, played by Garner and Jessica Henwick, who run out of money in Sydney. An agency finds them work in a remote mining town’s only pub. “You’re going to have to be OK with a little male attention,” warns the recruiter. When they arrive, someone has scrawled “Fresh meat” on the chalkboard outside the pub [with a pair of tits].
GG:
This movie is not realistic, you realise after a while (when Hugo Weaving's character is not behaving like a human being running a hotel) so there's no point in expecting characters' actions to be justified by their psychology. But even when you're moving tokens around on a playing board, there has to be some point to each move. ... Not in this film.
Things happen randomly. And each character is in a different world from the others. James Frecheville's and Ursula Yovich's characters' environments are dissimilar (sur/realist), while Daniel Henshall's character is in at least two different films all on his own. The key to understanding what's wrong with this flick is to consider Weaving's performance, as we've come to have a pretty good idea of how he works. It looks to me as tho on any given day the director told him how to look (drunk ... crazy ...) without any reference to any possible back-story or character development. So each of his scenes is like the cameo of another character in another short film. I'm guessing he hated the gig. ... Nothing to like here. Of any kind.
Cath Clarke, 'How Kitty Green took on Weinstein – then a mining town in the Outback', Guardian.
Garry Gillard | New: 12 January, 2023 | Now: 13 November, 2023