The Royal Hotel is an angry film. It got out of bed cranky and was testy all day. The heat and dryness of the Australian Outback certainly didn’t improve its mood any, either. I get the feeling, however, The Royal Hotel would have been angry on a beach in Cabo while holding an umbrella drink. It was made out of impotent rage by a certain somebody (writer/director Kitty Green) who probably heard, “You’d be prettier if you smiled more” at least a dozen times in the past decade.
Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henrick) are American party girls. They’ve gone to Australia to live it up post-college while putting life on hold. Funny thing about life — sometimes it doesn’t like being put on hold and happens anyway. The girls discover exactly this much when they run out of money while getting stoned within a kangaroo hop of the Sydney Opera House. Their shrimp done left the barbie and that’s not a knife, cuz these two can no longer afford utensils.
We good on gratuitous Aussie references? Cuz I’d like to move on.
Switching gears from “fun vacation” to “work vacation,” the pair take barmaid jobs at a deadend hotel three hours from civilization. The hotel itself, a two-story monument to boredom, is the only stable manmade structure for several kilometers in any direction. The women are not encouraged to shower, for scarcity of water. The women are encouraged to play nice with the locals, which consist of a least-common-denominator blue-collar band of men who visit the bar most every night.
Hotel/bar owner Billy (Hugo Weaving) shows them the ropes, which takes about 30 seconds more-or-less. Being sexist and condescending-yet-married puts Billy atop the pyramid of positive male role models in the film. Hanna is almost immediately put off by the entire experience an
d wants to cut her losses and crawl back to Sydney where the men are just as bad, but there are more women per capita. Liv isn’t as refined or demanding as Hanna; she likes the attention and doesn’t have a problem with the rampant sexist and sexually aggressive behavior on display most nights.
It’s only a matter of time before this kettle comes to a boil and Hanna has to make some tough choices. The problem with the film is they don’t come soon enough. Hanna can tell something is off almost instantly, but we have to wait an hour of screen time before we get any serious confrontation, and by then, it’s too late. What has been done can neither be undone, nor explained away.
The Royal Hotel is a film in which every.single.man on screen lies on a spectrum spanning between sexist and rapist. Every.single.one. While the film is quick to point out, “this is just a side-effect of Outback life among road crews,” the same is true of the guys they met in the city as well. There is no question that Kitty Green intended to make an angry pointed film, a poor woman’s Thelma & Louise, perhaps. However, the theme is one-dimensional, the action is listless and the conclusion will leave one simultaneously satisfied and unsatisfied. A severely edited version of The Royal Hotel would make a fabulous TV pilot, and I’d happily view the continuing adventures of the mismatched Hanna and Liv as they took on the week in 40-minute spurts. But feature-length film makes us resent the self-righteous Hanna even though we should be rooting for her come Hell or no water. I wanted this film to conclude far before it did, which -given the 91-minute runtime- is hardly a monument to taut storytelling.
There once was a Yankee named Hanna
Who had to modify her vacation planna
She hit the Outback
With one Jill and ten Jack
And a nightly headache from every manna
Rated R, 91 Minutes
Director: Kitty Green
Writer: Kitty Green, Oscar Redding
Genre: Angry women
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Angry women
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Men, men, men, men
