Anthony Hopkins took time off from the big league in 1991 to star in this small-scale, pleasing Australian film as an English time-and-motion expert in the late 1960s, faced with the difficult task of estimating possible redundancies at a moccasin factory in a small Melbourne suburb. The factory is pretty well the lifeblood of the town, so Hopkins, failing in an initial attempt to preserve his anonymity, is guaranteed hostility from the locals. What makes this film spring to life, though, is the variety of characters flitting in and out of Hopkins' life. Ball, the boss, played with immense sympathy by Alwyn Kurtz; Carey, the nerdish dispatch clerk (Ben Mendelsohn), lovelorn for the boss's daughter (Rebecca Rigg); Wendy, Carey's unglamorous friend (an exceptionally honest performance by Toni Collette, later the star of Muriel's Wedding); Kim (Russell Crowe), the smart-ass opposite side of the coin to Carey; and the workmen and women at Ball's, the men indulging in a passion for a slot-car racing (toy-car stuff on a grand scale) in which Hopkins finds himself beguilingly embroiled. A wise choice by Hopkins, this, choice being the operative word for a quietly effective film that wears its heart on its sleeve in the old-fashioned way.


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