Human beings are imperfect — which is one reason we have the movies.
The Australian comedy Mental, written and directed by P.J. Hogan — the man behind the 1994 hit Muriel’s Wedding — is filled with troubled people who, like most of us, strive not for perfection but at least for some understanding.
There’s the neglected housewife and disorganized mother who flits around her yard impersonating Maria from The Sound of Music, the troubled daughter who thinks she hears voices but who may just be recollecting episodes of Lost in Space, the free-spirited, ill-tempered drifter who keeps a knife in her boot: In the world of Mental, zaniness is next to godliness.
But in such copious quantities, it’s also exhausting. And even though Hogan has some terrific actors to work with — Toni Collette and Liev Schreiber among them — it’s never clear what he’s trying to say or do with Mental.
Does he mean to assert that freethinking people are sometimes mistaken for loonies? To acknowledge that while some people are, to use the movie’s parlance, mental, they can be greatly helped by medication and acceptance? To argue that suburb-dwellers are generally closed-minded, judgmental and dumb? All of the above? None of the above? Mental heads off in so many directions at once that it’s hard to follow along — and even harder to laugh with it.