It will soon be time for our movie wonder-kid Julian Dennison to put away childish things. He turns 21 this month. He’s been in three local features in the past 10 years – Shopping, Hunt for the Wilderpeople and now Uproar, as a kid not quite fitting his Dunedin Catholic boys’ school rugby ethos but lining up in the Second XV’s front row anyway.
He’s taken his outsize personality and comic timing to Hollywood, too, in films like Deadpool 2 and Godzilla vs Kong. So, Uproar marks the end of his screen adolescence, and he farewells it in style, carrying this coming-of-age dramedy through some occasionally rocky storytelling from a script that can feel like it’s a tug-of-war between where it started out and where it ended up.
As our earlier interview with the film’s co-directors explained, this rugby-themed story has been a game of two, or possibly more, halves.
It started with Paul Middleditch’s idea based on his own life about being a bullied outsider at a Wellington Catholic boys’ high school during the upheavals of the 1981 Springbok tour protests. It wound up with Hamish Bennett, on his second feature after the affecting Northland rural family drama Bellbird, taking on a rewrite. With Dennison’s casting, the film’s lead character was now a Māori kid. Making him an outsider required a shift to Dunedin and a fictitious – and not particularly Catholic – Catholic boys’ high in possibly the most Presbyterian city in the country.
So as well as a story of teenage self-actualisation, it’s also about young Josh Waaka finding a connection to his Māori-ness, something that he’d missed. His Māori dad had died some years earlier, leaving him at home with his lonely English mum (Minnie Driver, a surprisingly nice fit) and older brother Jamie (James Rolleston). As the film has it, he’s not particularly close to his taciturn sibling – the film really doesn’t make enough of the star duo’s pairing – and his only friend at school seems to be English teacher Brother Madigan (Rhys Darby, having fun) who encourages Josh’s bookish class clown towards drama, and slips him a copy of Greg McGee’s Foreskin’s Lament.
At the same time, Josh finds himself drawn towards those organising against the imminent arrival of the Boks and the film does a decent re-creation of a confrontation between a riot squad and protestors.
But while it captures the atmosphere of the era, complete with a soundtrack possibly inspired by Solid Gold Hits Vol 7, it’s hard to see what, or who, is actually motivating Josh or what he’s up against. His at first reluctant effort to go to drama school isn’t exactly annoying your dad by wanting to become a male ballet dancer during the miners’ strikes. That his drama school audition can be submitted on VHS, via the school’s primitive first-generation camera seems very ahead of its time. So, too, is some of the dialogue – it’s possible that “good talk” as a conversation-ender might have started out in 1981 Dunedin but it’s doubtful.
It doesn’t quite convince as a picture of what it was like to come of age in 1981 or indeed, what it might be like to find one’s tūrangawaewae in any era, or what that means. But Dennison’s big-hearted performance, especially when he’s bouncing off Driver and Darby, makes Uproar, if not uproarious, enjoyable enough to be a crowd-pleaser. Just avoid us grumps and our it-wasn’t-like-that-in-our-day on the way out.
Rating out of 5: ★★★½
Uproar directed by Paul Middleditch and Hamish Bennett is in cinemas now
