Best friends Lucy (Sophie Henderson) and Tom (Matt Whelan) have been managing their struggling theatre for years. Their lives are tied up in this place.
However, those ties are about to be unwoven.
While Lucy is happy with the status quo, Tom is getting married and looking to move onto a job at another, more upmarket venue.
When the theatre is threatened with closure, it also threatens to break the bond between Lucy and Tom.
A love letter to local theatre, Workmates got my attention because it is based around Auckland’s Basement theatre, a long-running venue that was formerly managed by the film’s co-writer and star, Sophie Henderson.
I have been visiting the theatre for decades - so long I can remember watching Henderson striding the boards there.
Over ten years ago, I started reviewing shows at the Basement, and I fell even harder for it. In that time, I got to see so many different types of theatre: one-person shows, stand up, workshops, puppetry, improvised dating.
It got to the stage where I would just pick a show based on the title and not read anything ahead of time.
The Basement is a special place and Workmates is a showcase for its particular charms. We only get a few snippets of various performances, but as a portrait of its geography, and atmosphere, it is effective.
From my limited perspective as a patron, the most unrealistic part of the film’s depiction is in a scene where a character attempts to carry his lover up the stairs to the second floor backwards. After spending so many years clambering up and down those slanting steps, this scene verges on fantasy.
So on that level, Workmates is terrific.
As a film, it is a little shakier.
One of the reasons I took so long to post this is because I was struggling to work out how to describe the film.
Tonally, it wants to have its cake and eat it - it wants both broad laughs and darker, messier human drama.
On the one hand, the film has the farce of keeping the theatre’s lights on, while it also wants to balance Lucy’s crisis of arrested development.
The film never manages to find a way between these two poles, and Lucy becomes a victim of the film’s tonal dissonance.
The character is afraid of growing up, betraying a childlike belief in ignoring problems that eventually catches up with her.
This is a fairly solid foundation for a character, but the film also wants her to be a screwball-style agent of chaos, which is where it falls apart.
In a bizarre early moment, Lucy intentionally fills a moving car with dry ice. She has been warned about it, and does it anyway, in a petulant attempt at play that plays less like a comic punchline and more like something more dangerous.
This moment colours the rest of her actions: she hides the theatre’s massive safety issues; she is lying about her employment situation.
Henderson’s character is terrifyingly self-centred, in a way that the film seems not quite able to handle.
The film’s hard segues in tone reach their peak when the film introduces a subplot involving sexual assault. As a sequence, it works. In the context of the film, it is one more plotline in a film that cannot decide on what it wants to focus on.
It does not help that the comeuppance for this subplot is an accident.
The performers are good and have an easy rapport.
Despite the film’s scattered approach, Henderson has a grasp on Lucy, managing to navigate through the film’s various hijinks without losing the character’s pathos. The theatre means something to Lucy - it is not just her literal home, but an escape from the problems of the outside world.
Workmates is more Lucy' s story so Whelan recedes a little - he is a good straight man and brings a quiet integrity to Tom.
While the performances are solid, the actors seem a shade too old for the characters they are playing. Not to say people can go through significant changes at any time of their lives, but the characters in Workmates feel like they are just starting to grapple with adulthood.
The film’s greatest success is in evoking the world of a living creative community. It is at its best as a fly on the wall experience as our protagonists struggle with the nuts and bolts of keeping the lights on.
Overall, Workmates is an easy watch. It has ambition in its scope and tone which it cannot quite reach, but the performances, and world it builds, are worth it.
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