Three Dollars

"Three Dollars" is one of the best films I have seen this year. I was not sure what to expect because I had never before seen David Wenham in a dramatic role. I had enjoyed him in comedies especially the television series "Sea Change".

The intricacies of his performance made this movie memorable, moving and fascinating. Other actors are believable and involving. The story is unusual but can easily be identified with. The direction allows the story to flow and makes the most of the emotions.

I can thoroughly recommend this film to anyone who likes to examine the morality behind decisions we make and the effects the decisions have on our futures.

I saw "Three Dollars" today, on a bleak Canberra day. It was not the best Australian movie I have ever seen (my heart belongs to "Picnic at Hanging Rock"). But it was the kind of movie that Australians ought to make (rather than being the location for explosion-based stuff from the US) and that Australians ought to queue to see. It was unerringly about us. Not the flatulent lies of nationalism or the chest-beating idiocies of economic rationalism. It was about how, faced with the second of those two catastrophes, a decent man emerged. He did not win (not in the film, anyway). His professional concern about a toxic land development did not stop it. He did not win Lotto, or write an award winning book. The most he may have done was change the perceptions of Amanda, a representative of those who succeed when goodness is a handicap. Like good men everywhere, since the Biblical Job, he tried throughout to act as a good man should. As is inevitable with screenplays adapted from literature, there were options that could have been taken and were not. One could quibble, but I'll leave that to others. Long scenes may have alienated some viewers, but were uncomfortably real - in my life at least, conversations don't end with the bit that advances the plot and events spill out in several directions at once. (Linearity is a curse!). The performances were uniformly sound. David Wenham showed versatility and a depth that was present in "The Boys". Frances O'Connor underplayed wonderfully, so that the Edam cheese scene became the strongest signal of her character. The child was unusually persuasive and thoughtful direction produced depth and colour from the more peripheral roles (the alcoholic, the creature made manager and Kate, the friend of Tracey). This is a film of lacerating honesty, and a work that asks whether society is advanced by blind progress. Eliot Perlman's book from which the film was adapted was a revelation - an epistle of decency written by a lawyer - and his second book ("Seven Types of Ambiguity") is even more challenging. I look forward to the film and am trying to predict the cast already.

Three dollars is quite clever it had great Aussie locations and an excellent cast. the cinematography was very Amateur but i quite liked it. David Wenham who plays eddie done a A class performance. people thought his movie had no story line but it did it was simple. it was about a man who used to have a good life but is now in a state of financial difficulties and is struggling to pay for his families meals. i can believe people didn't like this it was incredible!....the film had other meanings behind it such as homeless people in Australia, having a good job and people taking it away from you. filmmakers should make more films like this

It's a real shame that films like 'Three Dollars' don't get any recognition in there own countries, because it definitely shows what a great industry we have hear. The premise is quite simple: a tale about an honest man, trying to support a family who loses his job and nearly collapses. Throughout the film, we learn about how he met his wife, and what it really means to be down on luck.

It's hard to explain why this is such a great film, but it is undoubtedly a fantastic story that is well acted and directed, with an as usual great performance for leading man Wehnam. All I can say is that it is well worth seeing, one of the best movies I've seen this year, yet no one will ever know about it. See it if you get a chance.

There are many things to appreciate about Robert Connolly's Three Dollars, but the film could have been much better if it was dealt better with what I'd call its 2 main problems. These problems are: the unnecessary length of the film and the ambiguity of its main premise or what one's might call the distraction of the main dramatic problem in the storyline.

Starting off its trailer, no one could get the slightest hint what 3 Dollars was going to be about; so why there was a trailer in the first place? However, Robert Connolly in his Q&A with the premier show of the film in Brisbane repeated more than one time in his answers to the audience that "the film is about a good man being tested in all aspects of his life. Tested in his relation with his wife and daughter. Tested in his morality about his work. Tested in his financial situation, and tested even in the streets he walks on!" The film, as Connolly puts it, is "an epic story of an ordinary man." This definition for the main plot line in 3 dollars took the filmmakers to kind of misleading direction. Do ordinary people make epics? Probably yes, but Three Dollars in fact is not an epic film. It's a film that was frilled with many details that made its interesting story less connection. The film finds its appropriate pace in the last 25 minutes and holds it firmly to the end, but the first 90 minutes were so long that I'm sure many people won't stay on their seats to reach those interesting 25 minutes. Scenes, takes and dialogs were all very long that it could have been shorten. I believe that 3 Dollars strongly needs to be reedited and take off no less than 20 minutes of its unnecessary scenes.

Related to the problem of the film's length, one's could also points out to the problem of that the film spent very long time building up its frilled story just to reach its final point—where the ordinary man becomes a tramp for one night. On the way to reach that point, the film mixes many genres for no good reason. Sometimes it looks like black comedy whereas other times it was pure social realism story. Mixing genres, in fact, is good thing to reject Hollywood one-vision style of film-making, but it could be also dangerous exercise if it not done smartly. Mixing genres in 3 dollars seemed illogical and been done in a way that it didn't help the film a lot. Talking about mixing genres I just want to refer here to the homage Connolly had to Hitchcock's North By Northwest. I mean the famous scene where an airplane attacks/follows an unarmed man. This scene, though it was well done/remade in 3 dollars, is a good example for those sequences were audience's attention been drawn to something else rather than the main story.

But 3 Dollars is also a brave Australian film that succeeded avoiding some of the market requirements such as action, gunfights and happy ending. In fact, there is a brave thing about 3 Dollars that deserve special salute: filming the harsh street life of beggars and tramps. I think it is the first Australian film that dealt in this depth with this issue, which most directors usually avoid. Why they avoid it? Because it's hard to be done. Filming the harsh life on poor streets is a harsh practice itself. The best parts of 3 Dollars are those last 25 minutes about the life on the street. While watching those sequences, I was recalling the Australian aboriginal singer Archie Roach's song, Move It On, where he painfully sings, "I was raised on the street/ I'm nobody's fool/ yeah I was raised on the street/ but street can be so cruel".