Post by Capo on Jan 17, 2009 18:47:35 GMT
Lantana
Ray Lawrence 2001 | Australia/Germany
I'd seen this only once - back in March '05 - before revisiting it the other night. Back then I thought it was excellent. Now: meh.
I've spotted this decade an increasing trend in multi-character dramas that scutinise a group of people and their interweaving relationships and neuroses. I can see the appeal: taking a magnified, smaller community and painting some sort of riveting picture of interrelation, and allowing the viewer the opportunity to see all the dramatic irony of the deep secrets hidden beneath the characters' ongoing attempts at All Happy Families. There seems too to be a trend in making these characters visibly unhappy - pregnant airs and loaded sighs abound. Subtlety has no say in matters, despite surface aesthetic - methodic pace; mellow, suggestive exteriors; silence trumping dialogue, etc.
Lantana seems too convenient in its set-up to be riveting or profound, though. Its opening recalls Blue Velvet's delving beneath the surface of suburban charm, but thereafter, the whole thing is undermined by the contrivance of its plot. None of the film rings true, which undercuts the significant inclusion of a policeman and a psychiatrist as major characters.
The corrupt copper (Anthony LaPaglia; excellent) and the psychiatrist (Barbara Hershey; good if underused) establish the link to city professions, which already asks of the narrative things it cannot give; the death of the psychiatrist lies at the centre of the narrative. But to include a death at all is unwise. The intentions of Hershey's character's death is to act as a plot device, a means of revealing the surrounding tragedy that existed before her death as well as after it. Indeed, we have little time to mourn her death because the film takes a turn towards policier and investigation, arousing our suspicions (of murder, not the accident that actually happened); thereafter, a bit of audience-trumping tells us it was all a big MaGuffin. Not only were we wrong-footed into thinking this was a murder (it wasn't), but the banal death brings almost everybody out of their self-deluding shell.
This is unwise: the resulting investigation run by LaPaglia doesn't ring true at all; his unprofessionalism, accentuated by mounting personal distress (adultery-induced guilt), annoys the viewer as much as it does those he's interrogating, not because he's losing his rag when he ought not to, but because it's simply implausible. At least with Vic Mackie you've got a lengthy, serial narrative to warm to him and the credibility of his 'corruption'.
To make LaPaglia's character a cop - and the one which happens to investigate Hershey's disappearance - means the narrative must unavoidably take on the conventions of policier after Hershey's disappearance, something Lawrence isn't up to. This is probably due to time constraints, but also because the mounting coincidences that have to happen in order for the case to affect all of the several relationships exposited in the first, pre-death half of the film render things tedious and clichéd. How LaPaglia was having an affair with a possible witness, for instance; how the witness's neighbour is the prime suspect; how the missing woman already lost a child...
Another film about the perils of mutual silence, and just as ultimately flat as the likes of Babel and Crash. It would have been so much braver and better to not have had a copper in it at all, to make the death - if there is going to be one - more central to the already conflicting lives on show. Closer community required, instead of having people peppered here and there. It helps if we're drawn into why they're miserable, too; misery isn't enough on its own.
Ray Lawrence 2001 | Australia/Germany
I'd seen this only once - back in March '05 - before revisiting it the other night. Back then I thought it was excellent. Now: meh.
I've spotted this decade an increasing trend in multi-character dramas that scutinise a group of people and their interweaving relationships and neuroses. I can see the appeal: taking a magnified, smaller community and painting some sort of riveting picture of interrelation, and allowing the viewer the opportunity to see all the dramatic irony of the deep secrets hidden beneath the characters' ongoing attempts at All Happy Families. There seems too to be a trend in making these characters visibly unhappy - pregnant airs and loaded sighs abound. Subtlety has no say in matters, despite surface aesthetic - methodic pace; mellow, suggestive exteriors; silence trumping dialogue, etc.
Lantana seems too convenient in its set-up to be riveting or profound, though. Its opening recalls Blue Velvet's delving beneath the surface of suburban charm, but thereafter, the whole thing is undermined by the contrivance of its plot. None of the film rings true, which undercuts the significant inclusion of a policeman and a psychiatrist as major characters.
The corrupt copper (Anthony LaPaglia; excellent) and the psychiatrist (Barbara Hershey; good if underused) establish the link to city professions, which already asks of the narrative things it cannot give; the death of the psychiatrist lies at the centre of the narrative. But to include a death at all is unwise. The intentions of Hershey's character's death is to act as a plot device, a means of revealing the surrounding tragedy that existed before her death as well as after it. Indeed, we have little time to mourn her death because the film takes a turn towards policier and investigation, arousing our suspicions (of murder, not the accident that actually happened); thereafter, a bit of audience-trumping tells us it was all a big MaGuffin. Not only were we wrong-footed into thinking this was a murder (it wasn't), but the banal death brings almost everybody out of their self-deluding shell.
This is unwise: the resulting investigation run by LaPaglia doesn't ring true at all; his unprofessionalism, accentuated by mounting personal distress (adultery-induced guilt), annoys the viewer as much as it does those he's interrogating, not because he's losing his rag when he ought not to, but because it's simply implausible. At least with Vic Mackie you've got a lengthy, serial narrative to warm to him and the credibility of his 'corruption'.
To make LaPaglia's character a cop - and the one which happens to investigate Hershey's disappearance - means the narrative must unavoidably take on the conventions of policier after Hershey's disappearance, something Lawrence isn't up to. This is probably due to time constraints, but also because the mounting coincidences that have to happen in order for the case to affect all of the several relationships exposited in the first, pre-death half of the film render things tedious and clichéd. How LaPaglia was having an affair with a possible witness, for instance; how the witness's neighbour is the prime suspect; how the missing woman already lost a child...
Another film about the perils of mutual silence, and just as ultimately flat as the likes of Babel and Crash. It would have been so much braver and better to not have had a copper in it at all, to make the death - if there is going to be one - more central to the already conflicting lives on show. Closer community required, instead of having people peppered here and there. It helps if we're drawn into why they're miserable, too; misery isn't enough on its own.