|
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
adapted from the official synopsis
On an annual fishing trip in isolated high country, Stewart (Gabriel Byrne) and his three friends find a girl's body in the river. It's too late in the day for them to hike back to the road and report their tragic find. Next morning, instead of making the long trek back, they spend the day fishing. Their decision to stay on at the river is a little mysterious-almost as if the place itself is exerting some kind of magic over them. When the men finally return home to Jindabyne, and report finding the body, all hell breaks loose. Their wives can't understand how they could have gone fishing with the dead girl right there in the water-she needed their help. The men are confused-the girl was already dead, there was nothing they could do for her. Stewart's wife Claire (Laura Linney) is the last to know. As details filter out, and Stewart resists talking about what has happened, she is unnerved. There is a callousness about all of this which disturbs her deeply. Stewart is not convinced that he has done anything wrong. Claire's faith in her relationship with her husband is shaken to the core...
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Though it's by no means a terrible movie, anyone who knows and loves the magnificent Raymond Carver short story ('So Much Water, So Close To Home') on which it's based is advised to steer well clear of this ill-conceived "adaptation." Scriptwriter Beatrix Christian and director Lawrence haven't so much translated the tale from page to screen, more traduced it in a manner that's often bewilderingly crass: Carver's delicate miniature (one of the stories loosely dramatised in Robert Altman's Short Cuts) is forcibly 'opened out' - including new characters old and young - so as better to support the film-makers' weighty political/social allegories. As the climactic scene makes all too abundantly clear, Christian and Lawrence (clearly buoyed by the adulation justifiably heaped on his outstanding Lantana [2001]) are aiming for a Grand Statement on Australia - dealing with the nation's history of sexual, marital, gender and ethnic tensions through the microcosm of a single small town.
Unfortunately, it just doesn't come off: in stark contrast to the intricate convolutions of Lantana, several of the connections between the various plots and sub-plots here feel contrived and/or soap-operatic. It's also weird that, with so many additional scenes and confrontations inserted, Christian has omitted the most crucial exchange from the story - the one in which the fishermen debate what to do about their shocking discovery. Instead there's a confusingly-edited sequence culminating in Byrne beaming as he brandishes the fish he's just caught - and the roles of his three buddies are so shakily delineated we never get any real sense of how each of them dealt with the moral dilemma with which they'd been faced, and which casts such a long shadow over everything else in the movie.
In addition, many of the newly-created characters seem to have been shoehorned in from different projects altogether. There's a pair of hyper-precocious, boundary-testing, death-obsessed kids who'd be more at home in Me and You and Everyone We Know, while the less said about the perpetually-lurking, psychopathic killer the better: at several particularly disastrous and melodramatic moments - as the culprit stalks and menaces Claire - it seems like Lawrence is auditioning for the director's job on Wolf Creek II.
Audiences unfamiliar with the literary source-material, however, may well find much to admire and enjoy here. The performances (especially Laura Linney, outstanding in the very tricky central role) are uniformly strong, the dialogue is authentic and direct (while retaining a mysterious poetic undercurrent) and the shifting relationships between the main characters - especially the tensions in the central couple - are multi-dimensional, authentic and intriguing. Karl Sodersten's editing audaciously chops the story down into what are often elliptically enigmatic small segments, while David Williamson's cinematography makes the most of what are clearly areas of astonishing natural splendour - indeed, the environs are barely recognisable from those recently seen in Cate Shortland's similarly Jindabyne-set, but much snowier (and, it must be said, markedly superior) Somersault (2004).
But even if you come to this film without any knowledge of Carver, you'll surely notice several things which are "off" about the picture. While the women are feisty, multi-faceted and intelligent, their men are - almost without exception - caricatures of 'Ocker' stupidity and insensitivity. While the landscapes are often ravishing, Lawrence's use of them - which occasionally recalls Terrence Malick - is naggingly reminiscent of what's still perhaps the most famous of all Australian movies, Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) - and Lawrence strains so very hard for transcendence and ominousness (often via choral wailing on the soundtrack) that he passes far beyond the point of acceptable hommage.
The 'nature stuff' in Jindabyne isn't there merely to make attractive backdrops - the natural world isn't a neutral presence, but an active participant in the lives of the continent's human and non-human occupants. This all ties in with Aboriginal concepts of death, rebirth and natural cycles and balances - fair enough, but it's typical of Lawrence and Christian's misguided approach that this should culminate in a scene which rather jokily implies that the homicidal murderer will meet justice not from any police agent but from representatives of the local fauna.
The film's whole treatment of its Aboriginal characters is, despite what seem to be impeccable intentions on the part of the film-makers, decidedly troubling - indeed, they're barely able to register 'characters' at all. We only really see them when 'white' characters enter their territory; the only Aboriginal individual who is named is the dead girl; and at no point - in what is a long, two-hour-plus film - are the Aboriginal folk allowed sufficient dialogue to vocalise their viewpoint on events.
It's a less serious flaw, but isn't it somewhat unfortunate that the character with the keenest moral sense, the most sympathetic person on view, also happens to be the only American: Linney's Claire - who spends much of the second half of the movie ticking off most of the people she meets. Surely Lawrence and Christian aren't suggesting that the solution to Australia's ills lies in further interference from the USA? This would be an unfortunate implication at the best of times, never mind while Australia is under the leadership of John Howard - a man so long regarded by George W Bush as one of his most reliable "cobbers."
Neil Young
29th May, 2007
JINDABYNE : [5/10] : Australia 2006 : Ray LAWRENCE : 124 mins (BBFC timing)
seen at the Cornerhouse cinema, Manchester (UK), 25th May 2007 - public show (paid £5.30)
|
