I discovered this review of Jindabyne in one of my NYT email updates tonight. It's opening in NY & Los Angeles today. Last year, when it was released in Oz, dlowan & I had a bit of a discussion about it! ( few pages back in this thread.)
The director of Jindabyne is Ray Lawrence, who also directed just about my favourite Oz film ever - Lantana.:
Murky Emotions Floating to the Surface
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: April 27, 2007/NYT
In this Australian film opening today in New York and Los Angeles, Laura Linney plays a wife upset by her husband's reaction to a corpse.
In the 1960s the town of Jindabyne was intentionally flooded by the damming of a river and left at the bottom of a newly created lake in the middle of the Snowy Mountains in southeastern Australia. Present-day Jindabyne, a skiing and fly-fishing resort, is the setting of Ray Lawrence's somber new film, in which the old settlement, now underwater, is occasionally mentioned. When it is, the implication of submerged life becomes a haunting, obvious metaphor, since "Jindabyne" concerns itself with emotions that lie under the surface of daily experience, and with a mysterious past murkily visible through the membrane of the present.
Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney as a troubled couple in "Jindabyne."
Claire (Laura Linney) is a transplanted American who lives in Jindabyne with her husband, Stewart (Gabriel Byrne), a former race car driver, and their young son, Tom. The marriage is shadowed by an earlier episode ?- Claire had some kind of breakdown and deserted the household shortly after Tom's birth ?- and by the unwelcome presence of Stewart's smiling, meddling mother (Betty Lucas).
What brings their latent bad feelings out into the open, along with a good deal of fresh grief, is a gruesome discovery Stewart makes while fishing in the mountains with friends. He finds the body of a murdered young woman ?- she's a member of an Aboriginal community that lives nearby ?- and though he is horrified, he and the other men keep fishing, tethering the corpse to the shore with fishing line and allowing a day and a night to pass before they alert the police.
This incident and its aftermath ?- Stewart's unthinking insensitivity, Claire's horrified reaction to it and the local scandal that follows news of the fishermen's behavior ?- are borrowed from a Raymond Carver story called "So Much Water So Close to Home." A great deal has been added, by Mr. Lawrence and Beatrix Christian, the screenwriter: a half-dozen or so secondary characters, each carrying a carefully measured share of personal unhappiness.
But "Jindabyne" at the same time tries to remain faithful to the ethical and dramatic crux of Carver's brief, unadorned vignette, which is related in Claire's rueful, matter-of-fact first-person narration. "She was dead," Claire says to her husband. "But don't you see? She needed your help." Claire raises an unusual and difficult moral problem: What are the obligations of the living toward the dead?
"So Much Water So Close to Home" suggests that men and women approach this question differently, and that the chill that falls over Claire and Stewart's relationship is partly an expression of the gender division embedded in every marriage. To this basic schism, "Jindabyne" adds more, including cultural and racial elements that are no less interesting for being altogether remote from Carver's concerns.
In the film Claire seems almost stereotypically American in the way she insists on working through the trauma of the dead girl's discovery, pushing toward the therapeutic goals of healing and closure, while her white Australian friends urge her to move on and let go of her fury and shame. Their own unsentimental, shrugging ideas about death are at odds with Aboriginal customs as well, and the mutual suspicion and incomprehension between the two populations, as well as the clumsy efforts toward tolerance and respect, are addressed acutely and with sensitivity.
That description could cover the acting as well. There are few actors who convey the wounded intelligence of an ordinary person in distress as well as Ms. Linney. The characters she portrays are often, at first glance, satellites to a central male drama ?- the mother in "The Squid and the Whale," the wife in "Kinsey," the sister in "You Can Count on Me" ?- but in each of these cases it turns out that her psychological precision holds the key to the story. Here, Claire's evident sanity and kindness draw the viewer to her side, and we are a bit startled to discover that she, like everybody else, has weak points and blind spots.
Everybody else includes not only the glowering, ferocious Mr. Byrne but also a handful of accomplished Australian actors, notably Deborra-lee Furness and John Howard as Jude and Carl, Stewart and Claire's friends, who care for their orphaned granddaughter and manage a motel and campground. The sense of place ?- of community as well as landscape ?- gives "Jindabyne" texture and detail, but the movie also has a heavy, overburdened feel.
The wilderness surrounding the town is beautifully shot (David Williamson is the director of photography) in a wide-screen format appropriate to its vastness and in dry, thin colors suggestive of summer in the mountains. Like many other movies made in Australia (and in keeping with some of the Aboriginal beliefs it explores), "Jindabyne" treats the natural world as an active spiritual presence. (Nicolas Roeg's "Walkabout" and Peter Weir's "Picnic at Hanging Rock" are among the touchstones of this tradition.)
Sometimes, as in a climactic cross-cultural encounter at the edge of the forest, this augments the film's power and mystery. But just as often the sights and sounds of nature add a brooding, willful sense of portent at odds with the stark contours of the narrative.
And too many of the incidents, conversations and subplots seem to have been stuffed into the delicate vessel of Carver's story rather than allowed to grow organically out of it. We know from the opening scenes that a hermitlike local electrician killed the woman, and his intermittent presence provides more distraction than illumination: his inexplicable evil overshadows the human frailty that is the film's more cogent subject. Similarly, the friendship between Tom and Caylin-Calandria, Jude and Carl's granddaughter, has an overdone spookiness.
Mr. Lawrence's last film, "Lantana," was a superior specimen of the kind of multistranded narrative that has become (see "Crash" and "Babel") the dominant genre of international prestige filmmaking. "Jindabyne" is simpler, but perhaps not simple enough. It's not just that the clean, efficient lines of Carver's story are blurred and tangled. The real flaw is that the movie's best features ?- the aching clarity of its central performances ?- threaten to be lost in a wilderness of metaphor and mystification.
"Jindabyne" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has explicit and implicit violence, profanity and sexual references.
Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/movies/27jind.html?_r=2&8mu&emc=mu&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
