Smash Palace, written
by Roger Donaldson, Peter Hansard and Bruno Lawrence
Smash Palace is an excellent name, for it
refers to a scrapyard, in preposterous, humorous manner.
One of the writers of the script, Bruno Lawrence,
plays the protagonist, Al Shaw, who owns the Smash Palace, the place where
wrecks are brought, after going through accidents that have rendered them
inoperable.
He is married to Jacqui and they both have a
daughter, Georgie, who will be at the center of the drama.
Al Shaw is too busy with his Smash Palace,
working on cars and racing at times to be able to observe that the periodical
fights with his wife might result in an irreparable damage and possible
definitive separation.
One night, instead of going out with his wife
to a festivity, with singing and drinking, he lets her go on her own, where she
has the company of the local police officer, Ray Foley, who is a friend of the
family.
Jacqui has a few too many drinks, she becomes
ebullient and inviting, as Ray drives her home, late into the night, where the
husband is asleep in bed, when the friend and his wife arrive at their house.
Jacqui is unhappy with her life in New Zealand;
the film was made in 1980, when the situation in this Kiwi land was not as prosperous
as it is today.
She wants her husband to abandon his tinkering,
which seems to keep him busy all the time, while neglecting his spouse and
daughter, sell the property, for which he could get half a million dollars…New
Zealand currency maybe.
Al Shaw is not just reluctant, he rejects the idea,
for he is confident that this is Heaven on Earth and everything is superb,
happy as he is with his family, the garage and the automobiles, plus the
racing.
Even if he turns out to be a sort of
complicated character, if not an outright antihero, the protagonist might be
the one who is right on the matter of moving to Australia or some other
promised land.
Quintessential writers, thinkers, professors
and psychologists have demonstrated that we believe in some myths, wrong
perspectives on what would make us happy and you can find about that in
classics like:
Stumbling Upon Happiness by Harvard Professor
Daniel Gilbert or The Myths of Happiness by another brilliant author- Sonja
Lyubomirsky
Men and women tend to believe that, if they
only moved to California, the Caribbean or some other sunny, earthly heaven
everything will be wonderful and they will be happy and joyful for the rest of
their lives.
Only when they move to this Eden, they experience
what is called Hedonic Adaptation and get used with palm trees, sunshine, ocean
and get annoyed with the limitations of any earthly territory, from heavy traffic
to ultra-expensive electricity on some islands, which also experience frequent
outings and…devastating hurricanes.
This is not to say that Jacqui is the negative
character in the film, even if she has chosen to become intimate with the
friend of her husband and did not prove exceptional Social Intelligence when
she requested restraining orders.
On the other hand, maybe she has a wondrous Emotional
Intelligence, if we consider the involution of the husband, who gets crazy when
his spouse walks out of the house, takes the child and then makes it difficult
for him to see and take her whenever he wants, which he thinks is his right as
parent.
Al Shaw does many crazy things, from taking all
his clothes off in front of the new lodging of his spouse, after being denied
entrance, to using his towing truck to take the whole door off the hinges when
the same denial faces him.
However, he crosses all the red lines and
becomes a criminal, apparently demented father when he decides to take his
daughter away, using a gun to threaten Ray and his wife, throws the truck into
the river, to confuse the investigating party following on his tracks and takes
the girl to the middle of the woods.
This is where he thinks he will enjoy at least
a few weeks with his child, even if it means she has suffered a trauma, was
terrified when he took her using the shotgun and she is now in the wild,
without her mother.
One may wonder what was in the minds of the
writers of this motion picture, did they rally behind this antihero, tried only
to tell us a story that is credible, or was it something else that lies
beneath?
It looks real and this is also because of the
nature of the main characters, who, apart from Jacqui are distinguishably unattractive,
provoking some, if not most of the audience to puzzle over the reasons why Jacqui
would like any of the two, the possible reason being that they are so remote
and this may be one reason why she wants to live in Australia.
Things get worse, with the child getting sick
in the forest and the father obliged to take her to civilized territory to get medicine,
then kidnap one person, face the law, only to bring it all to some other
challenging conclusions.
It is not clear why The New York Times has
included this feature on its list of Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made:
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