Movie Nation

Three future stars from Down Under pop off the screen in “The Efficiency Expert,” a delicate, dated and yet timeless fish-out-of-water period piece set in Australia at the birth of the job-cutting “consultant” boom.

Toni Collette, impressive and emotional in a romantic supporting role here, would break out in “Muriel’s Wedding” three years later, and have the most impressive career of the three.

Russell Crowe shows off the blustery tough guy he’d become as a thin, dashing and vain villain in this wistful, sentimental comedy about a workforce that’s a “family.”

And Ben Mendelsohn, top billed among the three back then, would age and smoke his way out of the higher-voiced baby-faced youth he appears as here to play grand villains as a late bloomer, cranking up the evil in everything from the “Star Wars” universe to the “Marvel” one.

Director Mark Joffe’s movie — scripted by Max Dann and Andrew Knight — came out the same year as the all-star film adaptation of the downsizing dramedy play “Other People’s Money,” and reaches for some of the same emotional notes. Long before “Up in the Air,” the “Greed is Good” ’80s sent venerable and vulnerable companies around the world into cut-cutting/stock-price-boosting layoffs, which eventually launched a whole new industry — layoff “management.”

But before that, consultants were hired to show up at companies, look at the books and carry out “time and motion” studies of the workforce to bring “efficiency” to (mostly) manufacturing concerns.

That’s what Errol Wallace (Anthony Hopkins) and his partner Jerry (John Walton) do. They’re wrapping up such a consultancy with an Australian auto parts manufacturer, where big layoffs would make a union company more attractive to American buyers in the mid-60s.

Jerry’s an amoral “Someone’s always going to lose out” rationalizer. “The trick is to make sure it’s not us.”

But Errol, as brittle and blunt as he can be, is hitting the midlife pangs of guilt stage over what he does in his career. That next consultancy, at the Balls moccasin manufacturing concern in Spotswood, a working class suburb of Melbourne, just might put our cutthroat cost-cutter over the edge.

Sure, there’s “ineffeciency” everywhere. The women doing the shoe-stitching chat all day, even during their long group lunches in the cafeteria. The shipping department is a bunch of old-timers and trainees wasting time on personal calls and plotting their strategy for the big state slot-car racing grand prix they hope to win.

Old Man Ball (Alwyn Kurts, just twinkly enough) has relatives all over the payroll, and is bringing in his daughter (Rebecca Rigg) “for a while,” just until she can get her modeling career going.

That makes young inter-department runner Carey (Mendelsohn) and everry other male his age on the workforce breathless with lust. Does he stand a chance against the young sales exec Kim (Crowe)? And does that mean he’s no longer besties with his young stitcher-neighbor Wendy (Collette)?

But they all have something bigger to worry about when Errol Wallace rolls up. The smart ones are either alarmed, or conniving (Kim) to survive this doomed factory’s fate. But most of these lifers are happily oblivious.

“Crikey,” Wallace mutters (a Hopkins first). It’s “like visiting my grandather’s house, and finding it full of people!”

He enlists Carey as a stop-watch clicking “time and motion” measurer. And as the “other” deal Wallace’s consultancy has turns into protests and near-riots at the auto parts supplier, he finds himself at a crossroad. Can he do anything to “save” this company and the people in it from obsolescence?

A telling scene has another kid there get a co-worker to splash eye drops in his eyes, as another worker tells Wallace “He’s allergic to sheep skin,” the material they make their moccasins from.

“Why does he WORK here?”

Why, “It’s where his future is!”

It was wistful and melancholy to look back on the ’60s and the death of manufacturing from the early ’90s, when this film was released. “Efficiency Expert” can seem downright quaint today, with its dusty, anitquated factory, slacking-off workforce and the idea that “the future” could be a job for life that somebody might be guaranteed, or that anybody would want to stay with such a gig for more than a short stretch.

But Hopkins, on the cusp of his greatest decades as a star, gives us a hint of humanity peeking out from the callous “cost cutter.” Mendelsohn is adorable as a kid too naive to gracefully manage asking the owner’s daughter out, too dim to see what she’s really like and slow to catch on to the new “promotion” that has him in a coat and tie every day, and makes all his friends turn on him for turning them in as “inefficient.”

Crowe sets off sparks as the office bully. But Collette lets us see the great character actress she would become in a couple of simple moments of romantic heartbreak.

Among the several comedies of this subgenre from that era, “The Efficiency Expert” plays as the lightest, if not the most lightly delusional in a wish-fulfillment fantasy light. As Springsteen sang in the middle of the Reaganomics/”Wall Street” ’80s, “foreman says ‘These jobs are goin’, boys, and they ain’t comin’ back.”

The storytelling is, pardon the word, “efficient,” with just enough heart and “cute” to get by. The characters are archetypes, but realistic and functional ones. And how can we tell the difference between Errol and his partner Jerry? One drives a practical (if anachronistic) ’72 Rover. The other’s in a flashy Volvo P1800.

Tthe cute setting, quirky characters and a very good cast putting their best foot forward, young and old, to keep up with Hopkins make “The Efficiency Expert” a worthy outing in the “fish out of water” and “obsolete industry/workforce” genres.

It’s worth tracking down just for the chance to catch Crowe before his Oscar, Mendelsohn before he aged into the villains he’s grand at playing or Collette at her most winsome.

Rating: PG

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Ben Mendelsohn, Toni Collette, Rebecca Rigg, Alwyn Kurts, John Walton, Bruno Lawrence and Russell Crowe

Credits: Directed by Mark Joffe, scripted Max Dann and Andrew Knight. A Miramax release on Tubi, Amazon, other streamers

Running time: 1:28