Pity the pretty-boy actor, won’t you? Such as poor Zac Efron, who is, no snarking, breathtakingly beautiful and yet (so?) goes full grunge in, one imagines, an attempt to be taken seriously as an actor.
It sounds like I’m being facetious, maybe even deliberately cruel, but I swear I’m not. I think Efron is great: super talented, an amazing singer, and an absolute joy to watch onscreen, especially in movies like The Greatest Showman and, yes, the High School Musical series. (He sold me on the latter, when I eventually gave in for the third one.) There was a time when an arrestingly gorgeous man who could sing and dance and just distract you for 90 minutes would be reason enough for celebration: hello, 1930s Depression-era Hollywood escapism, and maybe, for better or for worse, that’ll come back soon.
Until then, herewith Australian indie Gold. Set in a not-too-distant future that hasn’t yet gone full Mad Max but is clearly on its way, this is the tale of an unnamed man (Efron: The Disaster Artist, Baywatch), a stranger in town, who has hired another unnamed man (cowriter, with Polly Smyth, and director Anthony Hayes: Animal Kingdom, Ned Kelly), a local, to drive him across the Outback to someplace called The Compound, where Man One hopes to find a job and a better life. Man Two scoffs that Man One has no idea what he’s in for, but it’s Man One’s money, etc, and so off they go.
It’s a days-long drive through an absolutely desolate landscape devoid of people, services, any hints of civilization except that it is collapsing, such as roadside signs warning — in multiple alphabets and languages, suggesting either past invasion, global strife, or both — that you travel beyond at your own risk. The car radio crackles with bits and pieces of terrible news from the world beyond. The near silence between the men, as dry and dusty as the road they travel, is testament to how bad things are: it’s a silence of exhaustion, of desperation, of clinging to scraps of hope.
And then a big scrap of hope: a ginormous hunk of gold, mostly buried in the desert floor, that the men stumble across during one of their overnight camping stops. It’s way too big for them to shift on their own. One man will have to make a multi-day trip to the nearest settlement to get excavation equipment, and one man will have to stay behind to guard their find. Of course, the men don’t trust each other. Of course, there are risks to either chore: this is not only a lawless land but an unforgiving one, with no water and killer weather…
Nothing that happens from this moment on is in the least bit unexpected. Except, perhaps, that Gold becomes a near one-man-show for Efron, who underplays, in an effective less-is-more way, the physical and psychological implosions his character suffers under the harsh privations of the Outback and the foul mindworm of greed. (Not unexpected: Efron is as good at this heavy stuff as he is at the light stuff.) His performance is nicely supported by Hayes’s efficiency as a filmmaker: the director is restrained and unshowy and matter-of-fact, letting stillness and suggestion do most of the heavy lifting. But by the end of what turns out to be an open-air chamber piece, and a brutal one, the sense of futility we’re left with is more unintentional than it might have been.
more films like this:
• The Twilight Zone: “The Rip Van Winkle Caper” (S02E24) [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Paramount+ US]
• The Bad Batch [Prime US | Apple TV | Netflix US/UK]
