Australian
Screen

Clip description

Eddie (David Wenham) has been sacked, but hasn’t yet told his wife. At Flinders Street Station in Melbourne he uses a payphone to line up an interview at a placement agency, but an elderly woman falls on the pavement as he’s rushing to his interview. Eddie picks her up, gets her a drink and some asprin, and tears his suit coat in the process. The woman asks him why he is helping her. Eddie doesn’t answer.

Curator’s notes

In the scene just after this, Eddie mentions the writer Franz Kafka, and there’s a strong sense throughout the film that he’s living in a nightmarish world, in which the state is a corrupt and malevolent force, and minor officials use every opportunity to grind their heels in the faces of those they are supposed to serve. The point about Eddie is that he remains a decent man, despite all of this. That is his nature, and he can’t really explain it when questioned, as the elderly woman does here. It will also be what saves him, Connolly seems to be saying, if it doesn’t kill him first. Few Australian films of the last decade have stirred such a strong response in the public (or the powerful) domain as Three Dollars did in early 2005. The film was screened for government members at Parliament House in Canberra; the leader of the Greens, Bob Brown, hosted Connolly and David Wenham on a visit to the Styx River forest in Tasmania. Connolly was invited in for a long chat with the then leader of the federal opposition, Kim Beazley. The film cost around $3 million, a modest budget, but did very well at the box office.