Face to Face

A version of this review appeared in The Age, September 8, 2011.

Shot mainly in one location, Michael Rymer's functional adaptation of a dreadful David Williamson play offers a view of workplace conflict that seems unlikely to satisfy anyone outside of a high school English class. We witness a mediation session conducted by the all-wise Jack Manning (Matthew Newton) in an effort to resolve the problems of slow-witted young Wayne (Luke Ford), who has lashed out after being fired from a scaffolding company.

The boy complains of bullying, his blustering ex-boss (Vince Colosimo) has problems of his own, and soon a host of skeletons are tumbling out of the cupboard, enabling Williamson to give us his two cents worth on sexual harassment, industrial relations, and other burning issues of the day. Shifting creakily from one such talking point to another, the “plot” is impossibly neat, while the message (which boils down to “Why can't we all just get along?”) registers as the purest kind of wistful thinking or bad faith.

Most of the actors do a creditable job with the phony material, but the main novelty is the casting of the impish Newton as Williamson's idealised alter ego, a role that might originally have been written for an older, more conventional authority figure. Newton plays it "straight" yet often seems ready to break into the wolfish grin of a man who enjoys his job a little too much; dispensing tough love on all sides, Jack presides over the free and frank exchange of ideas with the aplomb of Tony Jones on a busy episode of Q&A. In short, he's the only character who doesn't wind up revealing all his secrets – and consequently the only one who seems like anything more than a stereotype.