Russell Mulcahy's past as a music-video director keeps breaking through the surface of Swimming Upstream, a strange, fact-based family drama that gives itself over to stylistic overdrive during its frequent swim-race sequences. The renegade behind Highlander II: The Renegade Version, Mulcahy repeatedly indulges a weakness for split screens, aggressive editing, and pounding techno music. The latter touch seems especially peculiar in an otherwise earnest '50s and early-'60s period drama about Australian swimming champion Tony Fingleton (as played by Jesse Spencer), and his harrowing upbringing in a family dominated by the emotional abuse and drunken rages of his father (Geoffrey Rush).
Adapted, Antwone Fisher-style, by Fingleton himself, from the autobiographical book he wrote with his sister Diane, Swimming Upstream documents the young Spencer's struggle to win the approval and validation of his father, a blue-collar powder-keg who's perpetually shadow-boxing demons from his own traumatic past. A veritable walking textbook on how not to raise children, Rush pits Spencer and his younger brother against each other, then explodes in rage when Spencer continually triumphs over the favored son. The always-great Judy Davis co-stars as a long-suffering wife and loving mother, a woman of enormous kindness and strength of character who calls upon tremendous reserves of bravery to keep her family from being ripped apart by Rush's bottomless resentment and free-floating hatred.
Rush initially gives a beautifully modulated performance that hints at the cruelty to come, but conveys enough sweetness and vulnerability to justify Davis' affection for him and faith in their future together. The film begins as a delicate duet between Rush and Davis, but as Rush spirals out of control, his performance becomes a flashy, over-the-top solo akin to his hammy turns in Shine and Quills. Worse still, the brothers are defined almost entirely by their relationship to their parents and each other, and they never establish strong identities for themselves. Ironically, Fingleton has given a showy, larger-than-life role to the actor playing his hellish father, while presenting himself as a thin, underwritten shadow. The young actor playing Fingleton's younger self spends more time exercising his muscular arms and legs than his acting chops.