How do you make an onscreen relationship between a middle-aged spinster and a 20-something mentally handicapped man sympathetic and believable? That’s the question writer/director Michael Pate no doubt asked himself a million times during the scripting process for “Tim.”
Pate ultimately took the minimalist route in this 1979 Australian feature starring Mel Gibson as the titular character and Piper Laurie as Mary, the lonely, middle-aged American career woman who becomes his confidant and then lover.
It’s a move that required commendable restraint, but has also helped to sell the film short. It may be based on a very well regarded Colleen McCullough novel (which I haven’t read), but “Tim” the film suffers from character mismanagement that leaves Mary an undernourished presence pushing uphill the most unlikely of relationships.
Just how handicapped Tim might be is something left a little foggy by the filmmakers. He may live with his gently protective parents, Ron and Emily (Alwyn Kurts and Pat Evison), but bounces with self-confidence and doesn’t seem to suffer from any deficiency in vocabulary. When he first meets Mary, showing up at her comfortable home to do the garden chores, he has little trouble making small talk with the friendly stranger, the older woman only taking a true interest in Tim when she learns of his underdeveloped mental capacity.
Ron and Emily are glad for this new presence in Tim’s life, but Mary’s emotional incursions rattle the young man’s overly solicitous sister, Dawnie (Deborah Kennedy), who takes to viewing their relationship with a potent jealousy.
Despite his sister’s protestations, Tim and Mary begin to form a strong bond and it’s here that the film starts to unravel.
Mary is barely more than a name on the page, she’s so thinly drawn. There are no friends or lovers and no past besides the fact that her parents are dead a concept Mary actually needs to explain to Tim (a good move considering later developments in the story). There’s seemingly no voice of reason or protest nothing standing in the way of her developing such a heavy relationship with a young, retarded man. Is Tim the only kind of man she could possibly fall for? For the less generous viewer, it would be easy to imagine Mary as a vampire or werewolf, keen on sucking the blood from such a prime piece of young man meat.
As the film moves on, numerous peripheral plot points are weaved that push the couple together. The effect is a further cheapening of their relationship, its dependence on sentimental circumstance a concern for any viewer seeking satisfaction in the bond.
And that’s too bad, because “Tim” certainly has a number of things going for it, most notably its cast. Gibson is strong in his first screen role after “Mad Max,” making a decent fist of playing a mentally handicapped individual, and Piper Laurie is as graceful and luminous as ever. In the supporting roles, New Zealand stalwart Evison is fantastic, while Alwyn Kurts proves a scene-stealer as Ron.
“Tim” turns out to be a pleasant enough diversion, but its weak script keeps it leashed to the open side of implausibility. Implausibility is of course ruinous in any film, but particularly so in one that charts such an unlikely (and potentially inappropriate) relationship.
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