Film
One morning in 2004, an Aboriginal man named Cameron Doomadgee was arrested for swearing at a police officer; forty-five minutes later he lay dead on the floor of his cell. Something had gone badly wrong, though the white senior sergeant on duty, the towering Chris Hurley, denied he was in any way at fault.
... (read more)So Patrick White’s most flamboyant novel (with the possible exception of The Twyborn Affair) has been brought to the cinema, after the usual longueurs and fiscal frights. Director Fred Schepisi and his scriptwriter, Judy Morris, have tamed the long and somewhat unwieldy beast that won White the Nobel Prize in 1973. Lovers of the novel will miss certain sc ...
The opening frames of Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre are startling. Charlotte Brontë’s novel, published in 1847, is a trenchant portrait of female entrapment, but this new adaptation immediately thrusts us outside. A fully grown Jane (Mia Wasikowska) hastens down a hill slope and roams around a vast, viridian moorland. Nearly thirty film and television adaptations have led us to expect to discover Jane as a juvenile prisoner of Gateshead, confined to the sliver of space between window and curtain while a flabby, menacing John Reed hunts her down. Instead, a bird’s-eye shot shows Jane at a crossroad, and subsequent close-ups divulge her crying, the thing she has most been at pains to suppress. The twenty-first-century Jane Eyre is less a victim of cages and cruelties than she is cosmically alone.
... (read more)It takes fifteen minutes of screen time before Karen (Shai Pittman), the young Aboriginal heroine of Beck Cole’s Here I Am, finds a room of her own. Before this, we have seen her riding away from prison in a taxi, blissfully feeling the wind on her face; walking through dark Adelaide streets, clutching a box of treasured possessions; and prostituting herself to a stranger in a pub in exchange for a night’s accommodation.
... (read more)Anyone who remembers Julie Taymor’s 1999 version of Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s first published play, will not be expecting a reverential treatment of what is reputedly his last, but Taymor’s new film does move more or less inexorably to the play’s final wisdom: ‘The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance.’ The Tempest is a d ...
Directed by John Boulting in 1947, the original film version of Graham Greene’s thriller Brighton Rock is as honourable an adaptation as anyone could want. The plot may be simplified, but the essentials are all there (Greene himself co-wrote the script), and so is the cheery, grimy atmosphere of a mid-century British seaside resort, captured on location. There are two unforgettable performances, by Richard Attenborough as ‘Pinkie’, the psychopathic teenage gangster with a strangely pure belief in the reality of hell; and by Hermione Baddeley as Ida Arnold, the tart-with-a-heart who vows to bring Pinkie to justice.
... (read more)My heart sank when I heard that John Hillcoat was to direct a film of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006), one of the more terminally grim performances in recent modern fiction. It is the story of a little boy who roams the post-nuclear devastated earth in the company of his father, while the world draws to an end amid murder, rape, cannibalism, and abysses of corruption – an inferno of a world, one of the war of all against all.
... (read more)
When Raimond Gaita’s memoir Romulus, My Father was published in 1998, the acclaim with which it was greeted was ubiquitous. The book was significant not simply because it was a strikingly revealing personal narrative written by a renowned philosopher, but because it managed to present a story that contained large doses of personal tragedy without rendering the experience of reading it either falsely uplifting or overwhelmingly depressing. While offering vivid portraits of an inconstant, depressive wife and mother, and a self-possessed husband and father struggling with his own sense of self-worth, Romulus, My Father celebrated the power of love and friendship in the most subtle, telling and deeply humane ways.
... (read more)It is one thing for Macbeth (of whom more in a moment) to chide himself for ‘vaulting ambition’; it is not, though, the first stick we would choose to beat Australian cinema with. Now, with 2006 nearly over and everybody saying what a good year it has been for local films, I want to identify ‘ambition’ as a key element in the making of this ‘good year’.
... (read more)