MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Rikky, Pete’ Goes on Road to Comedy

In the Australian road comedy “Rikky and Pete” (selected theaters), film makers Nadia Tass and David Parker (“Malcolm”) have such a light, dry comic touch that the movie seems to be dreaming itself up as it goes along. It has the snappy opportunism of a good silent comedy--and a similar delight in colorful gadgetry and eccentrics.

One beautifully nonsensical scene exemplifies this. Rikky (Nina Landis) and Pete (Stephen Kearney)--a sister and brother on the run, disinherited by their father--look out the window of their mother’s Bentley at the rolling, desert flatland all around, and see a smiling crazy man running alongside them.

Everything adds to the comic pitch here: the “Krazy Kat”-Coconino County style spaces, the idiosyncratically posh Bentley, the siblings’ off-center daring. And also the perfectly judged barminess of their hitchhiker, Holy Joe (Roderick Williams)--who explains that his car locked into first gear several days ago, then got away from him when he stumbled over a rock while jogging beside it to kill time. Soon afterward, he’s singing hymns and trying to persuade everyone to join him in born-again bliss.

Not all of “Rikky and Pete” is as good as this scene, but much of it is. The film melds together two American genres: the road movie of the ‘70s and the screwball comedy of the ‘30s. Like the road movie, it gives us alienated characters who find themselves and their country while traveling. And like the screwball comedy, it plays around with the comic eccentricities of the wealthy and the pretty.

Rikky and Pete Menzies are rich kids in revolt. On the outs with their neurotic dad, they are being pursued by a brutal cop (Bill Hunter), who has already crippled their mother (Dorothy Alison) in an accident.

Their rebellion is a matter of style. Rikky is a country and western singer, singing gutty ballads of raw emotion. Pete is a bona-fide eccentric who spends his time constructing Rube Goldberg-style inventions: paper-flinging trucks, egg-flinging Erector sets and a mine-drilling robot horse. But it’s a circumscribed revolt. When they leave Melbourne, it’s to run a mine--and though they mingle and even make love with the scruffy miners and employees, they’re flying with a safety net.

There’s a whole air of gaudy slumming and irresponsibility about some of the movie. There’s also something aggressive about Pete’s inventions, and something near-psychopathic in his provocation of the mean cop--under his alter ego of Evil Donald.

But Tass and Parker are too good-natured to let these darker implications tear away the sunny filigree of their fabric. All good comedies work out of uncomfortable, itchy truths--the things you usually can’t say without a joke--and “Rikky and Pete” is no exception. The movie is a lark, right up until its overcontrived, overhectic ending--which is unsatisfying precisely because it suggests that the argument between the siblings and their dad is not over values but tactics.

Tass and Parker are an unusual team. She co-produces and directs, he co-produces, writes and does the cinematography. (He also designed all of Pete’s gadgets.) They’re one writer-director team that blends seamlessly--and since Parker is also responsible for much of the clean, vivid visual style, they obviously have overlapping tastes. Their actors play with an uncannily well-realized blend of naturalism and high comic stylization. There isn’t an unenjoyable performance in this film. The most pleasurable probably come from Williams, whose cameo is cockeyed perfection; Dorothy Alison, who puts a wicked, Oscar Wilde spin and glint on her lines; and Kearney and Landis themselves--with his bonk-eyed, Buster Keaton grace and her prickly, challenging attacks.

The film has the plain, dry, spare touch of a good silent comedy--few directors outside Blake Edwards have shown a slapstick timing this impeccable--and the cast is loaded (we haven’t even mentioned Bruno Lawrence, Bill Hunter, Tetchie Agbayani and Bruce Spence, who would be standouts in any other circumstance). The movie gives you some of the lazy charge of playing hooky on a sunny day or the giddy thrill of taking on a new life, impromptu. It’s a little ballad of wanderlust and enterprise, done in a free, exuberant, breezy style. It’s a charmer--and, most of the time, smart enough to hide the fact that it knows it.