Bryan Brown plays Australian men who say less than they know, and he has been doing it convincingly for five decades. The two films we have reviewed give him almost nothing to do, which tells you more about them than about him.
Fi1m perspective
Bryan Brown says his lines as if nobody had written them. He plays Australian men who would rather not explain themselves, working men and rogues, and the words come out flat and unhurried, in the order a man would actually say them. Bruce Beresford, who directed him three times, noticed it early, and it is still the first thing anyone notices.
The career has two halves and he has kept a foot in each. He came up with the Australian new wave of the late 1970s, in Phillip Noyce's Newsfront and Beresford's Money Movers (both 1978), then led Stir and Breaker Morant (both 1980). Television took him abroad, with A Town Like Alice (1981) and The Thorn Birds (1983), and Hollywood followed: the effects man in F/X (1986), the barman who teaches Tom Cruise the trade in Cocktail (1988), Gorillas in the Mist. Since the 1990s he has gone back and forth, supporting parts in American productions and better ones at home, lately on television in Boy Swallows Universe (2024) and Darby and Joan. He said of his early years in England, "I found rejection quite easy because I'd been a salesman," and the career has a salesman's patience about it.
He is best when the plainness has something under it. Handcock in Breaker Morant, one of the Australians court-martialled in Beresford's Boer War drama, is the performance in that film we believe without reservation, because Brown never raises his voice to tell us he is an ordinary man in over his head; he just is one, and the court does the rest. Pando in Two Hands (1999), the gangster opposite Heath Ledger, is the same instrument played for comedy and menace at once. The fair criticism is that he does not change his voice or his face from part to part. You get Bryan Brown. The answer is that Bryan Brown is a specific and useful thing to get, and the good films know it.
The two we have reviewed do not. King Carney in Australia (2008) is lost somewhere in the 165 minutes of Baz Luhrmann's muddle, and our review found no reason to mention him. Osiris in Gods of Egypt (2016) is a brief appearance in a film of thin characters and clumsy dialogue, and we came out of it and had to be reminded he was in it at all. We hold neither against him. Both are the kind of part a large production hands to a reliable man so that it can get on with the effects.
If you know him only from Cocktail, go to Breaker Morant and Two Hands, where someone wrote him a man rather than a type. He has never needed much from a script. He needs more than Osiris.
Biography
Bryan Neathway Brown is an Australian actor. Born on 23 June 1947 in Panania, New South Wales, he has appeared in more than eighty film and television projects since the late 1970s, working in both Australia and internationally.
His credits include Breaker Morant (1980), The Thorn Birds (1983), for which he received Golden Globe and Emmy nominations, Cocktail (1988), Gorillas in the Mist (1988), Along Came Polly (2004), Australia (2008), The Light Between Oceans (2016), Gods of Egypt (2016) and Anyone but You (2023). He is married to actress and director Rachel Ward.
