**/****
starring Rhys Ifans, Miranda Otto, Justine Clarke, Rhys Muldoon
written and directed by Jeff Balsmeyer
by Bill Chambers Danny Deckchair is so aware of being a formula fish-out-of-water comedy that it leaves some of the more crucial gestures of plot off its checklist, resulting in a film equally unsatisfying for its clichés and for its lack thereof. Rhys Ifans, that starved Allman brother, plays Danny Morgan, a Walter Mitty-ish construction worker stuck in a dead-end relationship with Trudy (Glenda Lake), a fame-hungry travel agent seeing a TV newsman on the side. Aware that Trudy is sick of his weird inventions, Danny ties a bunch of helium-filled balloons to a deckchair to rattle her at a barbecue and ends up floating away to the far off Aussie town of Clarence, where he crash-lands in the backyard of a lonely traffic cop named Glenda (Miranda Otto). When the villagers storm Glenda's house, pitchfork-style, in search of the alien they saw cruising the skies, Glenda impulsively introduces Danny as a visiting professor from her college days, and in no time flat the town adopts the stranger as one of their own. It's a shame that Danny's awakening to happiness is weaved into a fabric of deception, since it means we'll have to suffer the trite dismantling of his newfound life. Perhaps the filmmakers waited as impatiently as we do to reach that point, since there is nothing on the order of, say, the unsung Doc Hollywood to show that anyone but the love interest would ingratiate herself with Danny, who gives the locals a left-field testimonial two-thirds into the picture; it all feels rushed through the motions. (Raising Arizona, meanwhile, did better the policewoman and her dishevelled mate watching sunsets together.) Only The Lord of the Rings' Otto, securing our sympathies from our first glimpse of her like Emily Watson in Punch-Drunk Love, makes Danny Deckchair bearable, emerging from the wreckage a new and dignified sweetheart icon. Programme: Viacom Galas
