Rebel Wilson’s directorial debut, The Deb, has genuine warmth – but doesn’t quite work as a musical
- Written by: Mara Davis Johnson, Lecturer in Creative and Performing Arts, University of Wollongong
The Deb is finally here. The film has been plagued by unresolved legal troubles and repeated delays. But here it is – and for the most part, it’s an enjoyable Australian comedy with characteristically crude humour, but aimed squarely at a young, female audience.
It’s a shame it’s not as good a musical as it is a comedy.
The Deb began life as a stage musical, as the first recipient of Rebel Wilson’s scholarship program for young, female-identifying comedy writers. Written by Australian comedy writer Hannah Reilly and musician Meg Washington, the musical was produced by the Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP) and enjoyed a successful season in 2022. Almost immediately, Wilson flagged her intent to adapt the stage show for film.
Set in the fictional, drought-ravaged town of Dunburn, The Deb is a loose riff on the fable of the town mouse and the country mouse.
Wealthy, stylish, attractive and self-confident Maeve (Charlotte MacInnes, reprising her role from the stage production) is a Sydney private school student who, after being expelled from school for staging a political protest against the tyranny of the top shirt button, is dispatched to the country by her principal-slash-mother for some fresh country air and a change of perspective.
Her cousin and foil, Taylor Simpkins (Natalie Abbott), is an earnest, sweet, unpopular farm girl, desperate to find a date for the debutante ball. Politically, socially, and sexually, the two girls are a world apart.
All about the women
Maeve is initially horrified at the tradition of the deb ball and what she sees as its backwards, patriarchal implications. Yet one of the film’s strengths is that it manages to make the clash between Maeve’s woke politics and the sensibilities of Dunburn’s residents for the most part funny, rather than painfully didactic.
As Maeve softens, she realises that traditions – even antiquated ones – are important rituals that connect communities together.
There’s a lot to like about the performances. The Deb is a proud member of a movement that I have previously termed the “female turn” in Australian musical theatre, recognising the viewership for musical theatre overwhelmingly skews young and female.
The film is unambiguously geared at this market. This is a film all about the women, and both MacInnes and Abbott deliver in spades.
The male characters, like the salt-of-the-earth Rick (Taylor’s father and the town’s mayor, played by Shane Jacobsen) and Maeve’s dreamy love interest Dusty (Costa D’Angelo), are peripheral at best.
Wilson’s on-brand performance as Janette, a hairdresser whose claim to fame is having waxed Hugh Jackman’s “back, sack and crack”, delivers exactly the broad comedy that the project’s funders, who made her appearance on screen a condition of their investment, were presumably looking for. Wilson’s two onscreen daughters deserve special mention. Stevie Jean, who plays teenage mean-girl Annabelle, has one of the best voices in the cast, while Scarlett Crabtree’s Kid Koala is a comic highlight.
The trouble with the music
The strong performances are not enough to override the film’s central problem: that, devastatingly for a musical, the music is the weakest link.
The Deb doesn’t manage to settle on either a sonic or choreographic language that supports the deeply Australian narrative, humour, aesthetic and landscape underpinning it.
Individually, there are some great, catchy songs – but the score as a whole does not cohere. Stylistically, the influence of Fangirls and Muriel’s Wedding: The Musical is apparent, but the creators of The Deb seem to have misunderstood that in both these cases, there were more sophisticated dramaturgical underpinnings connecting genre, story and character than are evident here.
While songs can perform a multitude of different functions in musical theatre, in The Deb they mostly do not push the plot forward.
The film itself implicitly concedes this: as the plot heats up, there is a long, songless stretch where all the important things happen without music. To my mind, this was an admission by the filmmakers that the music is subsidiary to the action; a soundtrack, rather than an integrated, essential part of the storytelling.
Genuine warmth
My husband grew up in a country town akin to Dunburn, and I had the great pleasure of watching the film with my mother-in-law and sister-in-law, both of whom had actually attended their own debutante balls (my husband abandoned us after the first song, reinforcing my view about the film’s audience).
The three women who remained found many pleasurable, laugh-out-loud moments of quintessentially Australian humour in the film. It exhibits a genuine warmth for Australian regional towns, and the people who live there. It’s a welcome message for a nation that, as the current polling for One Nation indicates, continues to experience a city/country divide.
It’s a pity it doesn’t have a winning, iconic song to bind us together and do what musicals do best – send us out into our communities, armed with songs to share.
The Deb is in cinemas now.
Authors: Mara Davis Johnson, Lecturer in Creative and Performing Arts, University of Wollongong
