Last Cab to Darwin (M). Director: Jeremy Sims. Starring: Michael Caton, Jacki Weaver, Mark Coles Smith, Ningali Lawford. 124 minutes
In August 1996, 67-year-old Broken Hill cab driver Max Bell drove 3000 kilometres through the centre of the Australian outback to Darwin. Bell had stomach cancer and a dire prognosis, and his singular purpose for taking this unforgiving trek was to make use of the Northern Territory's freshly minted Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995, which had come into effect that July.
Bell would have been the first person to die under the act, but it wasn't to be, despite the efforts of euthanasia's leading proponent, Dr Philip Nitschke. Under the act, 'Nitschke had to find an NT-resident specialist in Bell's illness to confirm his diagnosis … and a psychiatrist to confirm that he was not suffering a treatable clinical depression', reported the Sydney Morning Herald in September 1996.
'Not one would come forward, and Bell returned home to die what is termed a "natural" death in hospital,' the report continued. Later, Nitschke recalled on his website that Bell 'was disgusted and angry at what he saw as the cowardice of the doctors'. Bell died weeks later back in Broken Hill, 'precisely in the way he most dreaded, slowly and with the process out of his control', said Nitschke.
Last Cab to Darwin, directed by Jeremy Sims and adapted from a play of the same name by Reg Cribb, is based on these events, but it is more accurate to say that it takes them and refracts them through the creative and the particular ideological bent of the filmmaker and writer. It is a warm, funny and thoughtful film that doesn't quite achieve the epic status to which it aspires.
In 1996, Bell's plight and the popular sympathy it garnered actually gave short-lived momentum to the erstwhile act. Sims and Cribb reimagine the story as a life-affirming parable about a man learning late in life what really matters. Max is recast as Rex (Caton), a well-liked Broken Hill cabbie who is an older, more jaded version of the mythical loveable larrikin Caton played (or subverted) in 1997's The Castle.
Dismayed by the prognosis that he has only three months to live, Rex abandons his work, home and affable, beer-swilling mates and sets out across the desert towards Darwin, where prominent euthanasia advocate Dr Nicole Farmer (Weaver) — a fictional substitute for Nitschke — is fighting an ongoing