“Dad bought this place fifteen years ago for a steal. As the real estate said: location, location, location. And we were right next door to the airport. It will be very convenient if we ever have to fly one day.”
In his opening monologue to a visual montage, Dale is basically setting the stage for the story to come. The backstory is his father having bought a home in a location nobody else—or anyone in their right mind—would even think about buying. It is this decision which sets the framework for the rest of the narrative.
There are only two places he did his thinking. In the pool room and out the back, looking up at the power lines. Yep, dad’s a real thinker.”
The guiding force of the humor in this comedy is irony. But it is soft irony, not the sort with a harsh cutting edge. And the guiding force of this soft ironic humor is that the Kerrigan family is utterly clueless bunch. Dale is expressing great admiration for his father in this line and it is genuine. There is no self-conscious irony at stake in any of the family. What provides the humor is not just the sincerity with which their cluelessness is endowed, but the fact that you can’t really find room to fault them. Cluelessness has become a tertiary epidemic in the post-truth world and it is all too easy to find fault with the abundance of stupidity in fellow men. The film almost reveals 1997 to be like an entirely different world from the post-truth generation of the 21st century.
“A man’s home is his castle.”
The sage saying is what gives the film its title. It is more than just a saying, of course, it is actually a consideration holding weighty significance within the law. Everything from property rights to stand-your-ground laws allowing the legal homicide of undesirables stems from this seemingly simple saying. So it should be little surprise, then, that it also has enough weight to lend a film its title. But it is specifically those property rights which is at stake in the film. Although a lighthearted and very sweet type of comedy, The Castle ultimately is really a rather serious metaphor for the land rights of Australian aborigines. The Kerrigan family must go to court to save their beloved home from legal acquisition by the government and, ultimately, the very fundamental basis of the idea that a man’s home is his castle it put for debate.
