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As you might expect, news travels fast in a town of eleven people. As you also might expect, tensions can run high. Close quarters and all that. And when one of those eleven people (and his dog) go missing without a trace, finger-pointing is inevitable, especially when everyone seems to hate each other to begin with. Such is life in Last Stop Larrimah, a new HBO true crime documentary of rib-tickling misanthropy that plays like a Down Under take on a Coen Brothers fable.
Nestled into a barren patch of Australia’s Northern Territory, Larrimah is a dead-end town left behind by the modern world. Life moves slowly in Larrimah, which is how the residents, a resentful, shade-throwing, leathery-looking lot, seem to like it. There’s a pub, where the same people show up regularly to guzzle and grouse, and a meat pie shop, whose proprietor, Fran, has an unkind word for just about everyone. She reserves much of her enmity for Paddy, a loudmouth, mustachioed cowboy type who likes to poke whatever bear crosses his path. Fran makes for a particularly juicy target, and when Paddy disappears one night after leaving the pub, she becomes a prime suspect.
Then again, in a town of this size and tenor, everyone is a prime suspect. “It really started to become obvious that there was utter hatred in this town,” explains Kristy O’Brien, an ABC News reporter who covered the case. Indeed, the doc gives the impression of a disparate group that decided to settle down in a land where they could freely loathe each other late into life. None of them look very healthy; the sun is apparently quite powerful in Larrimah. Everyone seems to have a beer (or something stronger) in hand. These folks have logged some hard years. But they always rise to the occasion of venting their spleens and hating on their neighbors.
The resentments are almost admirable in their innate purity; squint a little bit and they start to seem like cheerfulness, or at least blithe resignation. Of course, a likely murder has a way of throwing any such routines into disarray. As you watch archive clips of Paddy busting balls, prattling on, doing tricks with his whip, it’s almost hard not to wonder why it took so long for someone to get rid of him. Murder, of course, is no laughing matter, but the gambit of director Thomas Tancred (and producers including mumblecore kings Jay and Mark Duplass) is to play the material for deadpan gallows humor. Last Stop Larrimah is ultimately a pitch-black comedy — a digressive slice of cultural anthropology that chuckles into the abyss.
It’s also a murder mystery, although this purpose sometimes seems beside the point. The investigating police seem a bit terrified of their task, and it’s hard to blame them much; the citizens of Larrimah, for all their mutual distrust, have one thing in common: They really hate outsiders, especially outsider cops. But a leading suspect still emerges, a drifter/gardener, Owen, who works for Fran and has the pleasure of never speaking to anyone in town, though he had exchanged harsh words with Paddy. Did he do it? Did Fran put him up to it? And what exactly is keeping everyone in this heat-blasted purgatory?
You could argue that the filmmakers are making fun of Larrimah, but such a task doesn’t require much more than turning the camera on. The musical choices, including Lee Hazlewood’s “Trouble Is a Lonesome Town” and “I’d Rather Be Your Enemy,” are inspired for their thematic veracity and high lonesome tone. The cinematography captures just how intimate a town of eleven looks, how close one property sits to another. Most of all, Last Stop Larrimah affirms that the U.S. has no monopoly on smalltown weirdness. Here the façade of bonhomie gets scraped away easily, leaving the rancor exposed like old brick.
