Swimming Upstream

Brisbane, the fifties. There are five children in the Fingleton house; the father, Harold, drinks, is angry, and hands out affection and punishment as the mood takes him. Tony is the second child and always stands behind his brother John in his father's eyes. When he starts swimming he turns out to be extraordinary at backstroke. His father looks at him for the first time, and then sustains that attention by setting the two boys against each other. Every race Tony wins throws the balance at home a little further off. Russell Mulcahy directs, from Tony Fingleton's own memoir, which Fingleton also adapted himself. Geoffrey Rush plays Harold, Judy Davis the mother and Jesse Spencer plays Tony. A hundred and fourteen minutes. Less a sports film than a story about a father and a son.