Bryan Brown, Luke Bracey and Susie Porter give great performances in this story about a theatre-maker returning home to Australia from Europe to farewell his dying mother
Bruce Beresford’s The Travellers blends opera and the outback in a heartfelt story about homecoming
Famed Australian director Bruce Beresford loves opera. If you weren’t aware of this before watching his new film, The Travellers, you most likely will be by the time the credits roll.
It would be reductive to suggest this movie is one big ad for opera’s ability to unite rural Australia. Yet, the way in which Beresford folds this art form into The Travellers across 97 minutes is at once beguiling, heartfelt and at times quite on the nose.
Despite this occasional clunkiness, Beresford has written and directed a film sure to please the broad swathe of Australian cinemagoers who know and care for popular Australian actor Bryan Brown’s big screen career.
The Travellers feels very much of a piece with Australian writer/director Bill Bennett’s successful 2024 theatrical release The Way, My Way, a semi-autobiographical film that chronicles Bennett’s efforts to complete the Camino de Santiago trail in Spain.
Tonally, both films share what might be described as a “heightened naturalism”. In The Travellers, this works well in scenes where Brown plays the well-recognised archetype of an older, grumpy, blokey dad.
