Australian
Screen

Clip description

Restaurant owner Darren ‘Dabba’ Barrington (Timothy Spall) rejects an offer of partnership from drug dealer Chicka Martin (Gary Sweet). Dabba is an experienced criminal now largely going straight. Chicka wants to launder drug money through his loss-making restaurant, but Dabba doesn’t like him or his business. Barry ‘Wattsy’ Wirth (Sam Worthington) has just started work on the night shift at a service station when Johnny ‘Spit’ Spitieri (David Wenham) tries to rob it, armed only with a screwdriver. They are old friends from jail, but ‘Spit’ has returned to heroin since he got out. Barry helps him finish off the robbery when another customer walks in.

Curator’s notes

Chris Nyst’s script gives us a cross-section of criminal types, from the smooth and lizard-like Chicka, with an expensive suit and rings on his fingers, to the bottom-of-the-barrel Spit, who’s so incompetent he wears sunglasses on top of his balaclava. The language used by each of these characters is different, representing the different backgrounds of each. Dabba has a cockney working class turn-of-phrase; Chicka is mock business-like with a touch of threat. Barry speaks a much more educated kind of street language than his old friend Spit, whose vowels are part of what makes his character so hilarious. Listen to the way he says ‘impty da till neeow’, while waving a screwdriver. The ear for the differences in Australian English gives a sense of class-consciousness to the film, as does the presence of Timothy Spall’s character, an English crim who has settled in ‘the colonies’, perhaps for a quiet life. Gettin’ Square takes place across a wide cross-section of society, rather than simply at the working class end – where most English films of this sort dwell. Crime in this movie brings all sorts of people together – usually with the aim of robbing each other.