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The Nut Farm
Directed by Scott Corfield
Written by Scott Corfield, Sam Bowring and Arj Barker
91 minutes, rated PG
Selected cinemas
★
There are bad movies, and then there are movies like Scott Corfield’s homegrown The Nut Farm that suggest the usual laws of reality have been suspended. Granted, the budget isn’t enormous, but how was anybody persuaded to invest at all? And how did the finished product get a release on the big screen?
Arj Barker plays a small-time cryptocurrency guru.
In outline, this is a basic fish-out-of-water comedy, built around the laidback stylings of American stand-up Arj Barker, who has spent enough time in Australia over the past couple of decades to be considered an honorary local.
His character Brendan Brandon is a small-time cryptocurrency guru from San Francisco, who inherits a macadamia nut farm in NSW following the mysterious disappearance of his uncle (Roy Billing).
Having little else going on in his life, he heads Down Under, where he finds some eccentric new mates and sets about teaching himself the rudiments of farming (owing to a caveat in his uncle’s will, he has to harvest 20 tonnes of nuts by the end of the season or lose the property).
Despite having co-written the script, Barker is content to amble through the story without seeming especially convinced by any of it. His character is meant to be a pretentious New Age type, and is also prone to petulant gestures like throwing a map book out the car window – but mostly he’s a bemused observer rather than a figure capable of driving things forward.
Madeleine West and Arj Barker in a scene from The Nut Farm.
By contrast, most of the supporting players seize the chance to ham it up as far as they can. Tiriel Mora as Brendan’s lawyer shows off his rolling baritone like Orson Welles advertising frozen peas, while Jonno Roberts, as a wicked New Zealand gas fracker, rants like a villain on a 1990s children’s TV show.
The jokes, such as they are, fall into two categories. Barker is alone on screen a fair amount of the time, allowing scope for his deliberately feeble flights of fancy (Brendan gives the trees on the property whimsical names, such as “John F Kenne-Tree” – you get the idea).