Women everywhere may start cutting loose in their kitchens after seeing Goddess, a sweet if slight Australian film that suggests a hybrid of Mamma Mia! and Shirley Valentine. Adapted (and greatly expanded) from a solo play written and performed by co-screenwriter Joanna Weinberg, the film's terrain is sure to hit many distaff moviegoers where they live, whether or not they find themselves displaced to Tasmania with a former boyband star (in this case, Ronan Keating) as their often-absent husband. At times too peppy for its own good, the film's abiding virtue is the first leading role onscreen for stage musicals star Laura Michelle Kelly, who on this evidence has a celluloid career to set alongside her theatre work should she want one.
Indeed, one notes with some pleasure how much more relaxed Kelly seems to be as she advances into her 30s compared to the clarion-voiced if slightly stiff newbie who was the West End's first (and Olivier Award-winning) Mary Poppins and went on to star in The Lord of the Rings, among other shows. Capturing the multiple facets of the wonderfully-named Elspeth Dickens, a harried mother of hellacious twins whose musical gifts end up making her a reluctant star, Kelly here displays a natural ease and charm that you can't learn at drama school, and she is nicely paired with Keating in the far smaller role of her errant spouse, a partner who is off doing all sorts of high-minded things with whales when he is urgently needed on the domestic front. At first glimpse, in fact, Elspeth seems perilously close to collapse, remarking of her lot that "I need a tantrum of my own" even as such outbursts are left to her cute but none-too-cherub-like twin sons (played by real-life twins Levi and Phoenix Morrison).
One of the boys sports a pair of wings he refuses to shed, while the other has difficulty defecating, to use the verb preferred by the script. (That qualifies as Too Much Information in my book, but hey.) Keating's tattooed James - the singer more than ever resembling a double of sorts for David Beckham - would like to help but is off pursuing a higher calling, with the proviso that once the tearaway tots are old enough for school, he will take over at home and leave Elspeth to pursue skills as a singer that are being wasted at so considerable a remove from her British roots. (The two leads are pictured above.)
The turning point of the sliver-thin plot is a webcam gifted from James to Elspeth to facilitate contact that inadvertently leads our distaff hopeful on to stardom, but not without multiple if never-ruinous bumps along the way. Suffice it to say that the local gossips who have been busy ostracising Elspeth are by the end begging to share in her reflected glory, at which point cue a giddy dance number enveloping the entire community. The message: you, too, can become a goddess if you see out life's grimmer challenges with grace and a good set of pipes.
The director Mark Lamprell helped adapt Weinberg's play for the screen, and the script trades heavily on the anticipated polarities between careerism and motherhood and being a nobody as against - guess what? - a somebody. (The musical numbers are a tad racier, one of them kicking off with "I have an itch / to be a corporate bitch".) But the feel-good mood that prevails rescues all concerned from villainy, including a beady-eyed big city agent (Magda Szubanski, pictured above in full faux-musical flow) who is revealed to have a legitimate reason for her darker impulses. Goddess is the sort of film where everyone - even the little ones - gets to join the dance.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Goddess
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