It starts out with a classic premise: prodigal daughter makes a splash in the world, and revisits the podunk town that spawned her to settle scores. But the patchwork pieces of social satire, slapstick comedy, love story, whodunit, and tragedy don’t quite fit together in The Dressmaker. There are several moments when I actually laughed out loud, and others that are touchingly heartfelt. But as a complete design, the filmmakers never quite make it work.

Based on the 2000 novel by Australian author Rosalie Ham, the movie is directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse, from a script she co-wrote with her husband, filmmaker P. J. Hogan (Muriel’s Wedding). The story is set in a crumbling, dust-choked rural town at the end of the train line, far out in the Australian outback. With its enormous skies and parched landscape, the town looks like an abandoned set from a vintage Western movie. One night in 1951, a lone woman steps off the midnight train with a Singer sewing machine, a cigarette case, a drop-dead chic outfit, and a quest.

She is Tilly (formerly Myrtle) Dunnage (Kate Winslet), who was exiled from town under sinister circumstances as a 10-year-old girl. She’s returned to check up on her mother, who’s become a curmudgeonly old recluse the locals call “Mad Molly” (Judy Davis). Although her addled mum claims to not know who she is, Tilly cleans up her neglected sty of a house and sets up shop as a seamstress—drawing from the experience she’s acquired in the fashion houses of Paris, London, and Spain.

But there’s more than filial duty to Tilly’s unexpected visit. Rumor has it that she committed a murder when she was a child; Tilly doesn’t remember it, and her mum isn’t much help, but the town’s haughtiest movers and shakers (such as they are) still condemn her for it. Her only ally is Sgt. Farat (Hugo Weaving), the town’s only constable, who befriends her because he has a secret fetish for fine fabrics.

Nevertheless, when Tilly whips up a gown that transforms mousy Gert (Sarah Snook) into a ravishing beauty, even the snootiest local women start clamoring to join her client list. Meanwhile, Tilly is romanced by sexy footballer Teddy (Liam Hemsworth), eldest son of a neighboring farm family, who claims he doesn’t believe in the “curse” she thinks haunts her life.

There are some lovely moments. When Gert wows the locals at a dance in a gown concocted by Tilly, and a woman coos, “She looks like a movie star,” Moorhouse cuts to Gloria Swanson at her most psycho in Sunset Boulevard, playing at the local movie house. When Teddy takes off his shirt to be measured for a suit, Tilly and Molly’s disparate reactions are pretty funny (although the most entertaining expressions of glee I heard were from the audience).

Winslet is worth watching, as always. Her Tilly is as hard-boiled as she needs to be to get to the truth of her past, but still vulnerable about what she might discover. The scene where she disrupts a neighborhood football match by appearing in a scarlet sheath dress is a little corny, but Winslet rocks it.

But, like a pair of stiletto heels in the desert, the movie can’t quite keep its footing. While we keep expecting the story to go deeper, the plotting and the psychology remain pretty much on the surface—and mostly played for laughs. A couple of gruesome deaths, of the black-comedy variety, contribute to the cartoon atmosphere, so we’re left floundering the one or two times that the movie switches gears and expects to be taken seriously. One might argue that, in real life, comedy and tragedy exist side-by-side, but nothing else in this movie resembles real life.

Finally, the slapstick gooniness of the townsfolk make us wonder if confronting them was worth all the trouble for Tilly—the Paris couturier—to return at all. When a movie invites you to question its very reason for being, there’s something wrong in the design.

THE DRESSMAKER

**1/2 (out of four)

With Kate Winslet, Judy Davis, Hugo Weaving, and Liam Hemsworth. Written by P. J. Hogan and Jocelyn Moorhouse. From the novel by Rosalie Ham. Directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse. A Broadgreen Pictures release. Rated R. 119 minutes.

Filmmakers who serve as director, writer and actor are usually more talented in one aspect of their hyphenate than the others. The Birth of a Nation, by the much-hyped hyphenate Nate Parker, is best in one aspect: Parker has an actorly presence that makes this film immediate and powerful.

It’s the story of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in the early 1830s, which terrified the South. When Turner and his band were broken up, about 60 white civilians were dead. Turner grows from a houseboy on the estate that gave him his name. When there’s a reversal of fortune on the plantation, Nat (played in adulthood by Parker) is sent into the fields to have his hands torn by the sharp cotton thorns. Parker absorbs all this American nightmare with a grin of disbelief masquerading as a forced harmless smile. Parker’s Turner seems to be discovering the world of slavery as we watch—learning all the pitfalls that keep even a well-meaning, gentle slave from peace or safety.

Turner was taught how to read, and what the masters gave him to read was key to his revolt.  These slaveholders, so enamored of the Bible, never considered how their slaves might have understood the more genocidal passages in 1 Samuel.

Turner’s radicalization is balanced by the story of Turner’s master, Samuel Turner (Armie Hammer), who declines through loss, bad luck and drink. Frederick Douglass wrote that slavery poisoned both the slave and the master, and Birth of a Nation excels, like no movie I’ve seen, at illustrating the poison’s double effect. In the guarded, eventually shattered friendship between Nat and his master, there’s a pang of loss: hurt for Nat’s betrayal and sorrow, as well as a lesser pang for a spineless, solitary white man who could have had a companion instead of a captive.    

That’s not to say that the tragedy of slavery fell equally on the whites, and the atrocities are here to prove it—first, in one real horror-story sequence in a hot-box shed, and the punishment of Turner in the pillory. The movie has more appeal in the subtle reveal of decadence than—as Parker thinks—in the huge manipulative outrages. Worst is the savaging of Turner’s wife by a small group of white men. People can see this unexploitative filmed attack and its tragic aftermath, and decide for themselves what Parker’s feelings are about rape—it’s now well-known that Parker was accused of that crime in college. In the famous William Styron novel, it was Turner’s mother who was raped. Styron has been praised for rescuing a then-obscure rebel from forgotten history, but in both this 2016 movie and the 1968 Pulitzer Prize-winner, a sexual assault gins the rebel up into revolution. Parker overestimates the length of time it takes to get an audience ready for vengeance. Most moviegoers are as eager to see slaveholders get what’s coming to them as they are to see Nazis paid back.

Turner may have been a revolutionary who grasped a martyr’s crown, or a religious fanatic who saw signs in the heavens and heard the voice of God. Birth of a Nation is so much of a Christian movie that it’s being advertised as enlightening spiritual entertainment. Parker may have oversimplified this rebel, the way Jesus is always oversimplified in a movie. It may not be clear to the people who are most rapt about Birth of a Nation that you could make a movie about an Islamic suicide bomber just like this, with these many provocations and a finale of slow-mo violence.

For its weaknesses, Birth of a Nation is an important corrective, necessary since such serious nonsense is still talked about slavery more than 150 years since it ended. Take, for example, Bill O’Reilly’s opinion that the slaves who built the White House were “well-fed.” The point isn’t that, at some points in history, certain American slaves ate well. The point is that if you own a man, you can feed him as much or as little as you like.

Birth of a Nation R; 120 Min. Directed by Nate Parker. Starring Nate Parker, Gabrielle Union, Armie Hammer, Aja Naomi King, and Colman Domingo.