Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #41: The Rage in Placid Lake (2003).

Placid Lake (Ben Lee) is an anarchic misfit. Growing up the only child of new age parents Sylvia and Doug (Miranda Richardson and Garry McDonald), his best friend throughout all of school was crayon-eating science nerd Gemma (Rose Byrne), who grew up with her widowed father. After making a blistering fly-on-the-wall documentary about his family and high school life for his Year 12 graduation and subsequently ruffling many feathers, Placid marks this rite of passage by taking the plunge – literally, off a wall. After slowly recovering from this, he gets a white-collar internship and quickly sets about making this into a career, which means, for Sylvia and Doug, having to accept their son's rejection of their hippie lifestyle in favour of a corporate insurance career, and for Gemma, having to accept he has (in her words) “gone from fearless to gutless in a single bound.” Will they overcome these respective grudges, or will Placid have to regain their affections and approval while sticking to his chosen path?

Writer-director Tony McNamara's The Rage in Placid Lake (2003) has been called an Australian Rushmore, and indeed that's not an inaccurate comparison. It must be one of the best and most charming comedies in all Oz cinema and were it any more celebratory of its oddball characters... well, I just don't know you could call it. It also serves up a very cutting and realistic portrait of contemporary middle-class Aussie suburbia rather like Tim Burton (even though he's American) infused with some uncompromising and very inspired wit. McNamara's direction also smartly balances the two worlds Placid alternates between, with nice production design, ultimately showing how similar they actually are for good and ill.

Musician Ben Lee, in his screen debut, is basically his endearingly awkward self as Placid but he's nonetheless fully relatable and even shows decent comic timing. Richardson and McDonald have real chemistry as this out-there couple who only don't care about inadvertently embarrassing their son because they don't even know they embarrass him, and Francis McMahon is also entertaining as Placid's world-weary boss. But the MVP here for me is Rose Byrne, who makes the Marie Curie-aspiring Gemma the film's richest character, becoming a somewhat shrewish voice of reason to Placid while still raising a laugh (whether she's munching on a crayon or not). The Rage in Placid Lake is an unabashedly offbeat, mercilessly scathing and very, very funny satire of 21st-century Australia.