MOVIE REVIEWS : A Star Turn by McKern in ‘Travelling’

If a veteran actor is unusually lucky, he or she will receive a wonderful role to crown a long and distinguished career. That is what has happened to Leo McKern, who after 40 years of achievement in British films, theater and television, returned to his native Australia for the role of a lifetime in the warm, lovely and unpretentious “Travelling North” (opening Friday at Beverly Center Cineplex).

This time the bulky, bulbous-nosed, deep-voiced McKern (the perfect Falstaff) is not the reliable supporting player but the star. His Frank is a brilliant, bombastic ex-communist, a hard-driving Melbourne civil engineer nearing 70 whom we meet on the day of his retirement. Sloughing off a sudden pain in his chest, the widowed Frank takes off with the beautiful, long-divorced, considerably younger Frances (Julia Blake) to start a new life in a tropical paradise in Northern Australia.

The place may look like the Garden of Eden, but it doesn’t mean that Frank and Frances will live happily ever after. Time is beginning to catch up with Frank, and the question is how successfully will this sharp-tongued and volatile man be able to change his ways, not only to hold on to Frances but also to life itself.

Adapted by David Williamson, Australia’s leading playwright and a top screenwriter, from his own play, “Travelling North” is a Down Under “On Golden Pond,” a comedy-with-pathos of conventional style and sentiments made deeply affecting by the splendid playing of juicy parts. Director Carl Schultz (“Careful, He Might Hear You”) has taken an unobtrusive approach, serving his actors and their dialogue.

“Travelling North” could have used more style and is decidedly fuzzy in its sense of time passing. However, it avoids easy sentimentality and strongly conveys the truth that all that any adult, young or old, really has is the here and now.

The one thing that has to be taken on faith is the stunning Frances’ attraction to the aged and unhandsome Frank. However, Blake is such an understated and expressive actress that she makes it possible to believe that a woman of poise and intelligence could respond to the force of Frank’s intellect, noble character and larger-than-life presence. On his part, McKern shows us the sensitive and caring man beneath the grouchy old bear faced with the deepening shadow of mortality.

Frank and Frances by no means live in a vacuum. In their new home they’re befriended by Graham Kennedy’s Freddie, a sweet, lonely and well-meaning neighbor whom Frank at first barely tolerates--Freddie is the equivalent of Ann Sothern’s Tisha in “The Whales of August”--and by Henri Szeps’ Saul, the local doctor who, in Frank, has acquired his most irascible patient.

Back in Melbourne are Frances’ two married daughters (Michele Fawdon and Diane Craig), who quite realistically have problems of their own. (Their difficulties with their own spouses reflect their mother’s with Frank and serve as a commentary on the persistent chauvinism of the Australian male.)

For all its touching quiet interludes “Travelling North” (rated PG-13 for emotionally intense themes) is perhaps most satisfying--and certainly the most fun--when Frank is in high dudgeon. When poor Freddie has made the mistake of extending an invitation to a veterans’ club dinner, Frank rages that such organizations are nothing but repositories “for hidebound conservatism and mindless patriotism! And patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel!”

In a more rueful moment Frank observes: “The worst thing about growing old is when you issue an order from your 20-year-old brain and your 70-year-old body makes a mess of it.”