Cover image: The Travellers. Credit David Dare Parker/Sony Pictures

Throughout a long career that includes homegrown classics (The Getting of Wisdom, The Club, Breaker Morant) and American hits (Driving Miss Daisy, Double Jeopardy) Bruce Beresford has had a celebrated side hustle directing opera.

So it’s not surprising the veteran Australian filmmaker would one day bring that passion for heightened musical storytelling into a feature film, with the hero of The Travellers a stage designer who is forced to interrupt his illustrious European career and to return to Western Australia to be at the bedside of his ailing mother.

However, before making his way out hometown of Yarrabiddy (aka York), where his father Fred (Bryan Brown) is drifting off into his dotage while his mother Enid (Christine Jeffrey) is in hospital dying, Luke Bracey’s Stephen spends a night in his apartment in Fremantle’s historic West End and hooks up with his old girlfriend Jenny (Celia Massingham).

We later learn there are two other women in Stephen’s life, an Irish musician who zooms in a couple of times while he’s in Yarrrabiddy dealing with his family and local real estate agent Margie (Shubshri Kandiah) who happily jumps into bed with the cravat–wearing smoothie at the same time as sizing up the family home for a sale.

That sounds like a neat setup for rural-flavoured operatic high emotions — women throwing themselves at the rakish hard-to-pin-down artist,  a confrontation between a curmudgeonly father and the prodigal son, a clash between a worldly sophisticate and the down-to-earth locals and a couple of twists in tale.

Unfortunately, The Travellers unfolds at such a leisurely pace and is so devoid of comic and emotional kick that you wonder why Beresford even bothered with the opera trope. 

Throughout the film Stephen is working on a new version of La Traviata for a company in Germany and seems to be drawing ideas from his time in the bush. But Beresford doesn’t have a real interest in the one good idea that separates The Travellers from the raft of comedy-dramas about the younger generation dealing with ailing parents.

If The Travellers has any virtue it is in the charming performance of Brown. One of the most relaxed performers ever to work in Australian cinema — has any Oz actor ever looked so at home in front of a camera? — Brown brings a winning tongue-in-cheek quality to his father-son exchanges with Stephen, as if to remind the audience he still has all his marbles.

The problem with Brown’s twinkle-eyed performance is that he never convinces us that his character can’t look after himself. A scene in which Frank showers in his clothes to save water is amusing, but it is not the kind of thing that would have children panicking and organising for him to sell his home and get out.

It’s also a shame Beresford didn’t make more of the woman Frank was seeing during his time as a travelling salesman, a piano-playing bar owner in a nearby town named Elaine (Perth actor Alison Van Reeken). 

Stephen meets Elaine briefly, tells his sister about Frank’s girlfriend and that’s about all we hear of the woman whose bed the old man warmed on his journeys around the state (shades of Death of a Salesman). Surely Stephen could have brought her home for an uber-awkward dinner and the unflappable Frank on the spot. Something!

The title also alludes to the idea that Stephen is a chip off the old block, another wanderer who has a woman in every town and who doesn’t want to be pinned down. But like the opera allusion nothing is made of this old-school masculine drive to bed women and move on.

Indeed, the whole film is full of good ideas that for some reason Beresford fails to tease out, opting instead for old-school jokes, quirky characters, such as the bullies who turn out to have high-brow tastes and the taxi driver who believes he is a direct descendent of Jesus, and pretty scenery (it’s obviously York but for some reason the filmmakers decide not to call it by its name).

And some of the choices are downright odd, such as the sequence in which real estate agent Margie takes charge of staging Frank’s home for a sale even though Stephen is a world-fast set designer.

How much fun would it have been to see Stephen recast his dad’s home as if he was designing an opera in Berlin, a transformation that would annoy the hell out of his father, have the town finally seeing Stephen in action and triggering a bidding war? Opera comes to York/Yarrabiddy.

Early in the film Frank reveals to Stephen that he would have loved to have been a writer but he never went anywhere interesting enough to write about. Stephen responds by listing writers such as Tennessee Williams who never went anywhere but wrote about their families and their small homes, finding material so interesting the world was gripped.

A wonderful insight, but there’s nothing in The Travellers to back it up. Beresford, while he shows great love for all of his characters, simply doesn’t dig deep enough or push them hard enough or challenge them, preferring to let everyone coast from one unmemorable to the next, working up a nice vibe but not much else.