Doing Time for Patsy Cline
Starring Matt Day, Miranda Otto and Richard Roxburgh
Written, directed and produced, with John Winter, by Chris Kennedy
Opening nationally in Dendy cinemas on September 25
Preview by Jennifer Thompson
This film opens, and closes, with Leadbelly's timeless "Midnight Special", rendered with great feeling by Australian film spunk Matt Day. Everything in between is what happens to Day's country boy character, Ralph, including a stretch in prison, in his bid to make it in the country music Mecca, Nashville, Tennessee.
This is an easy film to like, especially if you like country music which the film's accompaniment and motive. The soundtrack lists some of the standards by Patsy Cline, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson and Ray Charles. As well, composer Peter Best wrote a number of songs, notably the "Dead Red Roses" which makes Ralph and Patsy (Miranda Otto) in the legendary town.
A lot happens to Ralph between the time he leaves the end of his parents' long driveway near the New South Wales-Queensland border and the time he realises it's time to quit Nashville. He says of country music giant Johnny Cash, who relaunched his singing career with "Folsom Prison Blues" about how slowly his prison term was passing, that Cash wrote the song having only spent three separate nights in prison, all for public drunkenness. Ralph spends three months in prison for a crime he didn't commit — and all before he makes it to the airport in Sydney.
Doing Time is the story of how Ralph hitches a ride with Patsy — named for Patsy Cline, she tells Ralph — and her dangerously bad boyfriend Boyd (played wonderfully by Richard Roxburgh), who might be the only character in the film who hates country music. Patsy and Boyd are travelling to Sydney in a flash green Jaguar, rented as it turns out with a stolen credit card, with a payload of drugs.
Ralph is almost instantly transfixed by Patsy's luminous beauty and astonishing singing voice but before he has too much time to understand why she sticks with the charming swindler Boyd, he finds himself the decoy for Patsy's escape after a high-speed police chase.
Sharing a country lockup with Boyd and three scary singing cowboys — in for "grievous bodily", they tell Ralph with pride — Ralph finds it hard to tell Boyd's truth from his lies, but somehow ends up persuaded to take the rap so Boyd can go free to look after Patsy.
Boyd's death in a small plane crash is his just desserts, but also a quirky reversal of the real Patsy Cline's death on March 5, 1963. Boyd is too selfish a bastard to give up the last plane seat and make the road trip with Ralph and Patsy to their next gig and Patsy Cline's "If I could stay asleep" wafts out as he goes to his death. Recommended.