The Rage in Placid Lake

Have the courage to be yourself. While some might deem such a statement twee garbage worthy of Al Franken’s lisping, self-helping sketch persona, Stuart Smalley, Australian playwright Tony McNamara has managed to fashion the shopworn adage into a compelling, painfully funny black comedy. Adapted from his stage play, The Café Latte Kid, which premiered at Sydney Theatre Company, The Rage In Placid Lake details the exploits of Placid Lake (winsomely rendered by musician Ben Lee, in his acting debut), the neglected progeny of two eccentric, establishment-hating, peace-loving hippies (Miranda Richardson and Garry McDonald).

Placid, a bit of an eccentric himself and a politely dogged non-conformist—he spends the majority of the film’s opening minutes traipsing about in a pair of bright red pants—invokes the ire of a trio of male schoolmates who subject him to routine beatings. But he bears the leery derision of his peers with surprisingly good humor, content in the friendship of his one true friend and confidante, the crayon-nibbling, nerdy-chic science buff Gemma Taylor (Rose Byrne).

In lieu of succumbing to the potentially spirit-crushing blows doled out by his male tormenters, the pathologically cheery Placid greets them instead at a high school graduation party with bleak visions of their future, quipping, “Look, I understand school’s over and you’ve suddenly realized you’ve peaked. Your dull but privileged lives are about to unfold. You know where you’ll work, you know who you’ll marry. Nothing to look forward to but f---ing each other’s wives.”

But this biting countermeasure ends up exploding in his face when a few nights later at graduation, the Hyper-masculine Triad catches up with him on the school rooftop. The next moment we see our protagonist hurtling toward the asphalt, only to wake up encased, mummified in a full body cast. He recuperates eventually but resolves to make himself over once-and-for-all, trading in his red pants for pin-striped slacks, his untamed mane for a clean-cut approximation of George W’s, his free-spirited ways for a job in the belly of the beast—a soulless maze of cubicles and gaudy Art Deco by the name of Icarus Insurance.

The film’s writer/director, Tony McNamara, is no stranger to the corporate environment, which he effectively skewers again and again over the course of the picture. “I was in the corporate world for a while,” says McNamara, “I studied Economics in school and then worked for a merchant bank. It’s kind of a weird place, an office—creates its own insanity sometimes which seems normal enough within the world of the office. Weird things happened in mine—fist-fights and other strange stuff—but it was all normal because it was part of the world.”

Since the film concerns itself primarily with the apparent mutability of personal identity, the business arena offers a more-than-suitable context for this discussion, due to what McNamara calls “the corporate takeover of your individuality.” Before he’s hired, Placid interviews with the office boss, Joel (played by Christopher Stollery), who explains to him, “If you’re looking for a place to flourish with structure, maybe a bit of fun, good view, good butts, no stress to speak of, then you’ve found it. If you’re looking for a place to hide … then you’ve found that, too.”

While, on the surface, Joel suspects Placid of seeking refuge from a checkered past (a fact that troubles him not at all), the notion of hiding carries with it a far more sinister implication: that joining the corporate hive allows—nay, requires—its participants to doff their unique identities in the interest of serving as drones, indistinguishable cogs. In return for your individuality, the corporation supposedly owes you the security of a steady paycheck, a pension, the fabled gold watch. At the least, assurance you’ll be cared for.

Songwriter and musician Ben Lee, whom McNamara pursued for the role of Placid after seeing him make a blessed fool of himself on a famous Australian talk show (“He had this electric guitar and he jumped up on the interviewer’s desk and the chord pulled out but he didn’t realize it so he just kept playing and singing like nothing had happened”), understands this struggle by nature of his involvement in the music business. Lee has been a performing musician since the age of 14, first in Sydney and then in the States after his band, Noise Addict, caught the attention of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and, later, Beastie Boy Mike D who signed him to the band’s now-defunct Grand Royal Records.

“[Placid Lake] is about the temptation to run away from who you are,” explains Lee. “I think a big question raised by the movie is: what’s your security worth? What’s your integrity worth? What price will you sell out for? And of course there’s no point where you’re going to get the right offer, but we all have to confront that because there’s a certain part of us all that wants to prostitute ourselves, that wants to say, ‘This record company, will you take care of me? If you take care of me, I’ll do what you want.’

"There’s a lot of temptation in our world and it’s kind of character-building."