Cate Blanchett

I didn’t watch much of the first series of Squid Game. Neither the concept or the execution held my interest. Therefore, I definitely did not bother to watch any of the rest of it either, nor Mr Beast’s version and nor will I watch the inevitable American version. However, I was struck by a headline in the Guardian which claimed that “the world’s best actor” appeared in the finale.

So, I thought to myself, “huh, I wonder which actor needed a pay check that badly?” and it turns out that Cate Blanchett could really use a million dollars for something or other. And, in the immortal words of Barry Norman, why not? When your career has been as varied and glittering as hers, why not make a quick buck?

Blanchett is yet another member of the Antipodean Invasion, although her father was from Texas. Her route into the big time was incredibly direct: after graduating from Sydney’s National Institute of Dramatic Arts – the same school which educated Baz Luhrmann and Mel Gibson and Hugo Weaving and, uh, Sam Worthington – she joined the Sydney Theatre Company and was cast in a supporting role in Sophocles’ Electra and impressed the director so much, she was given the lead when the title role came free. Boom. Instant stardom.

After impressing over and over on stage and TV, she broke into film in 1997 in Paradise Road and was cast as the lead in Oscar and Lucinda opposite Ralph Fiennes. This movie didn’t break any records or batter down many doors, but stood as a sign of how well-regarded Blanchett was. In fact, her performance was lauded and in 1998, Blanchett made the step from starlet to mega-star when she knocked our collective socks off as the titular queen in Elizabeth.

Award nominations – Oscar and Screen Actors Guild - and wins – Golden Globe and BAFTA – followed, and Blanchett is magnificent in the role. She didn't stop there! She’s arguably the best thing in Pushing Tin. She’s great in The Talented Mr Ripley. I suspect no other actress could so fully inhabit the awfully thin role of Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings.

The Oscars finally arrived for her turn as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator – Best Supporting Actress, though - and she’s continued to rack up great performances ever since. As an actress, I find her to be a superior version of Julia Roberts: Roberts is almost always good or very good, but only rarely great. Blanchett, on the other hand, is almost always great. We will not mention Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, nor Borderlands…

But Blanchett has never been happy to rest on her laurels, and the nominations have kept on rolling in. After Elizabeth and The Aviator, her performances in Blue Jasmine, Notes on a Scandal, I’m Not There, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Carol and Tar all caught the eye of the hive mind responsible for the Oscars and indeed she richly deserved Best Actress for Blue Jasmine (yes, I know, Woody Allen). She inhabits the role utterly and handles the material with aplomb. Shame about working for a rancid pervert, though.

But, much like with Jodie Foster, Blanchett followed an Oscar with a thoroughly obscure little movie. Unlike Foster, I suspect Blanchett had a much, much greater choice of roles, given where they were in their respective careers. Foster rather gambled on a squalid thriller directed by Dennis Hopper, while Blanchett…Blanchett went home, much like Nicole Kidman.

The project Blanchett went for was to be directed by fellow Aussie Rowan Woods, at that point an experienced and quite well-regarded TV director. In his resume are 18 episodes of fan favourite sci-fi show, Farscape. Details on the origins of the movie he made with Blanchett, Little Fish, are now thin on the ground, but the script was evidently strong enough to not only secure her, but also the hard-working Hugo Weaving and also Sam Neill. The alumni took this one seriously.

Little Fish features Blanchett as Sydneysider Tracy Heart, a former heroin addict who spends her days working as the manager at a video rental shop and dreaming of better things. She wants to get a loan to open an internet café in the space next to the video shop, and maybe buy the shop off its owner. But, as a former addict with criminal convictions and unpaid debts, banks and other creditors are not interested, although she promises her family and boss that she has, in fact, secured the loan.

The people around her have troubles of their own. Her stepfather, Lionel (Weaving) is himself a heroin addict in need of Tracy’s constant help. Lionel, a former rugby league star, is in a strange quasi-romantic relationship with his dealer, Brad (Sam Neill playing very, very against type), who is retiring from the drug trade. Tracy’s brother, Ray, brings an old friend over for his birthday dinner, Johnny. As it happens, Johnny is not only a former heroin addict, and the guy who was driving in the car accident which caused Ray to lose his leg, but also Tracy’s ex-boyfriend who’s spent the last four years doing God knows what in Vancouver. Tracy’s mum is horrified that Johnny is back while Tracy is more conflicted.

Apparently, Johnny has secured for himself a job as a stockbroker and Tracy remains attracted to him. In fact, Johnny and Ray are working together to set up a drug deal with Brad’s assistant, Steven. Eventually, Tracy finds out Johnny is a no-good lying dog; Brad finds out Steven is a double-dealing bastard; and Tracy is forced to confess she needs to find the money from anywhere to buy out her boss. Therefore, she agrees to help fund Ray and Johnny’s little adventure.

Things rapidly go tits up after that. Brad and Lionel go to Brad’s drug factory outside the city, which is where Steven has arranged to meet Johnny and Ray. When Johnny, Ray and Tracy arrive, Lionel is dying of an overdose, Brad has been quite bloodily vanished and a furious Steven decides he’s going to rob Johnny and Ray, which was probably his plan all along. Somehow, Tracy persuades Steven to let them go and our three wannabe drug entrepreneurs end up taking the corpse of Lionel to the beach, where they go for a morning swim.

The thing which struck me most about Little Fish is how understated it all is. In Britain or America, this script – appropriately localised – would have been given the 90-minute TV drama treatment, shot on video and cast with reliable actors from the cheaper end of the market. Quite how it attracted Blanchett, Weaving and Neill remains a mystery to me.

This is not to imply it is a bad movie. Far from it – I feel Little Fish benefits from its grounded, low-stakes approach. This isn’t a movie like Layer Cake, all fancy-dan gangsters trying to screw each over with dodgy deals and snipers and unspoken threats. This isn’t a movie about being a criminal. It’s a movie about several things at once.

The first and most obvious theme is, obviously, dealing with addiction. We never get to see why Tracy, Ray and Johnny try heroin. We don’t see them struggling with it or getting clean. We see them dealing with the realities of being small, unimportant people trapped in dead-end lives; ensnared by their pasts and the challenges of lifting yourself out of the mire. They are all, in their own way, little fish in Sydney’s big pond. We do get to see Hugo Weaving go full junkie, and a pleasant experience it is not. Weaving’s commitment to the role is complete and horrific. Lionel is a mess; as Brad notes, he is a giant of a man brought low by heroin. Lionel is filthy and dishevelled and suffering. If Trainspotting can credibly be accused of lending heroin a kind of crusty glamour, Little Fish is its antithesis.

A secondary theme is one of deception. Everybody is lying to everyone else. Tracy lies about her credit struggles and her past. Johnny lies about his work. Steven lies to Brad about his background dealing. Brad is lying to his estranged wife, but she knows about him anyway, and there are quiet, unexplored moments in the script where there are other secrets in Brad’s life. To a certain extent, every character in this story is lying to themselves.

To paint Little Fish as a tale solely about deceptive addicts is to do it a disservice. Only Lionel, and to a lesser extent Ray, are active drug users. Little Fish is, to me, a film about people desperately trying to fill the emptiness they have inside. Lionel fills it up with heroin, and Tracy, Ray and Johnny have given all that up. Tracy’s mum fills that space with angry maternal protectiveness. Ray tries to fill it by becoming a big drug dealer. Johnny fills it by pretending to be more than he actually is, under a façade of being a big businessman. Steven is desperately keen to make money and fill Brad’s space, while Brad appears to have given up completely. Of our small cast, only Tracy is scrabbling to find a legitimate and honest purpose for herself, only to be stymied by her past indiscretions. Everyone in this film is empty and miserable, and while it makes the story entirely plausible and permits the story to be so understated, it is a tale of misery. There is no hope on display.

It is still a good movie. You watch for the quality of the performances, even Sam Neill’s. Brad is a strange character, and we have to take it on trust he was, at some point, a serious and respected player. Within the film, Brad mostly comes across as an oily creep and Neill can’t really muster the menace he probably should. But perhaps maximally naturalistic performances are the point. Weaving is the pick of the actors, as he often is. Lionel doesn’t steal any of the scenes, but I bought Weaving’s portrayal of him completely. His misery is convincing.

As for Blanchett, I think she was a little wasted in the lead role. She’s very good as Tracy, but there’s not a lot for her to do. The stakes are low, those old Aussie emotions are withheld and understated, and the part does not let her flex her thesping muscles quite as much as a more demonstrative movie might. Yes, she’s tortured and uncertain, convincingly so. It still let her win Best Actress at the AACTA awards in 2005, and Weaving got Best Actor, which makes Little Fish an extremely well-regarded movie in its home country.

It's honestly quite hard to recommend Little Fish, in the same way it is hard to recommend Strangerland. Both are supremely well-shot, well-acted movies. Both are directed skilfully. Yet both are grim, depressing movies about ordinary Aussies having their lives put through the wringer. They are certainly films worth watching on the strength of their performances alone, and the brutal honesty of the scripts. Good times, they are not.