How to Make Gravy review – a well-intentioned, mawkish misfire | Australian film

How to Make Gravy is a rare example of a film that originated as a song – in this case, the beloved ballad by Paul Kelly. Maybe, given the entertainment industry’s addiction to recycling pre-existing IP, transforming popular tracks into movies will one day become a thing. Not that I’m looking forward to it: this soupy Christmas drama from first-time feature director Nick Waterman demonstrates how lyrics can become a series of reference points, with an obvious temptation to be very visual and literal – to give us that shot of a gravy boat being passed reverentially around the dinner table.

Waterman deploys the gravy early in the runtime, staging it as a moment of quasi-religious significance. This is not a subtle film – some scenes made my face react not like I’d consumed a delicious, nourishing sauce (infused with a dollop of tomato sauce for sweetness and that extra tang) but like I’d wolfed down a brick-sized block of artery-clogging cheese.

It’s no surprise that much of the film is based in jail, given the narrator of the song – a man named Joe, played by Daniel Henshall – is in the slammer, lamenting that he won’t be home for Christmas, his gravy recipe a symbolic vehicle to express his love of home and family. But I never took this film seriously as a prison drama, because a scent of mawkishness gives it an air of corny unreality. For instance: a moment when a prison choir performs an uplifting number about the need to be yourself and “sing like nobody is listening”. How long would these guys last in an actual prison before they were fed a knuckle sandwich?

Joe is presented as a decent man who’s made some mistakes. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if we’re to see this as a redemption story, the journey needs to feel earned, and Joe’s offences need to feel real. He is sent to prison after a violent altercation involving his brother-in-law Roger (Damon Herriman) and a police officer who comes to arrest him for an offence we don’t actually see. But it feels an awful lot like the writers (Waterman and musician Megan Washington) are making excuses for him: this is Joe’s first Christmas without his mother, after all, and he just got a bit carried away, not really meaning to head-butt a cop. Joe’s son Angus (Jonah Wren Phillips) defends him via voiceover, insisting, “My dad is not bad. He’s a good dad, who had a really bad day.”

From those wobbly early moments, the film has its work cut out, needing to bring some grit if it’s to be taken seriously as a hard luck story about making good in the prison yard. Instead it comes dangerously close to suggesting that a serving of gravy can magically cure what ails ya. Joe joins the prison’s kitchen crew, sharing his with the team, which includes Hugo Weaving’s Noel, a wise, fatherly figure who runs a men’s group. Joe’s gravy tastes so great that even Red (Kieran Darcy-Smith), a baleful man who has taken to hassling him, pauses to savour its qualities. Brown meat sauce as a soul-replenishing elixir, uniting scoundrels.

Henshall is, at times, an astonishing actor, tearing up the screen in Acute Misfortune and Snowtown. But here he’s limited by the script and doesn’t quite pull off the colour and shade necessary to make Joe fully dimensional. More impactful, albeit in a supporting role with less screen time, is French actor Agathe Rousselle (best-known for her wild performance in body horror movie Titane) as Joe’s wife Rita. Slogging it away at home with the kids, with some assistance from Joe’s brother Dan (Brenton Thwaites), she’s painfully aware that her life is caught in a grim but faintly hopeful present – better times behind her and, maybe, better times ahead.

You can feel throughout the film the temptation to be literal; thank goodness we didn’t get that scene with Joe reading aloud a letter he’s writing – beginning of course with “Hello Dan, it’s Joe here, I hope you’re keeping well …” There are also times when you can feel How to Make Gravy inching towards a deeper, more meditative space, only to get a bit dewy-eyed and tip into sentimentalism. I’m sure great songs can inspire great films – but this one is a well-intentioned misfire.