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Film Description
Satisfyingly murky Australian drama, charting the complex lives of a group of disparate characters in a Sydney suburb up to the point where one of them ends up dead in the shrub of the title. A murder-mystery more concerned with how-we-got-there than whodunnit, played out by an excellent ensemble cast.
It starts out as a murder mystery, and finishes as much more. In fact it has
a lot in common with Sunshine State, with its focus on a few characters and
their ... more >
It starts out as a murder mystery, and finishes as much more. In fact it has
a lot in common with Sunshine State, with its focus on a few characters and
their relationships. In each case there is a central event that affects
their lives – in Sunshine it is the attempted take over by property
developers, and in Lantana the identity of the murdered woman probed by the
camera at the start. Both films are superbly acted and directed. Both say
less about life than lives, without polemics and in a memorable, even poetic
way.
For me, Lanana was the more impressive movie of the two, thanks mainly to
Paul Kelly’s superb musical score and Ray Lawrence’s suspenseful direction.
Lawrence challenged the viewer by leaving us to work out just about
everything, not just the identity of the murder victim and the murderer but
what was going on under the film’s iceberg patina. (The metaphor works well
and can be taken further –if the characters revealed little about themselves
at the start, they warmed as the film unfolded, while stopping short of
actual meltdown. A further metaphor –lantana proliferating in Australia with
attractive orange and yellow blossoms but a complex warren of interconnected
roots –works equally well.)
The complexity of the film on the level of its underground relationships is
contrasted to its explicit moral values of openess and honesty, its outward
flowers. What is disturbing about both films is that Australia and Florida
become interchangeable with euroland –distinctions of place and lifestyle
becoming as displaced as the characters themselves. Wherever such features
are made, they unfortunately appear to be growing more and more alike.
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The opening shot of Australian director Lawrence’s complex drama takes us over, and then into, the shrub of the title, wherein lies a body. A conventional Hollywood mu... more >
The opening shot of Australian director Lawrence’s complex drama takes us over, and then into, the shrub of the title, wherein lies a body. A conventional Hollywood murder-mystery would take the finding of a corpse as a starting point and move on from there, but Lantana rewinds a couple of days to fill its audience in on the backstory of several disparate characters, and presents the body as the culmination of increasingly passive-aggressive relations in and around suburbia. Middle-aged cop Anthony LaPaglia, when he’s not jogging himself to death or crossing the line in his job, is cheating on wife Kerry Armstrong, who’s turned to therapist Barbara Hershey to solve her problems, only Hershey’s being distracted by a gay patient who’s having an affair with a married man the therapist suspects may be her husband, shambling academic Geoffrey Rush.
Writer Andrew Bovell adapted from his own stageplay, though you’d never guess, which is the measure of his and Lawrence’s achievement. With this many characters, and this much dysfunction on display, the obvious comparison to make would be with Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. That film had three hours to adapt some of Raymond Carver’s short stories, and Lantana needs every last minute of its two hours to tie - and then untie - most of its knots. Often that claustrophobia does the film a great favour, adding to the writer and director’s vision of not just one, or a few relationships heading for the rocks (as is more common in films such as this), but of an entire world cracking up, where trust increasingly takes second place to lies, and where even the innocuous act of passing someone on the street becomes fraught with danger.
If this all sounds rather bleak, well, it is, but the tangled web Bovell weaves throws up some coincidences that are quite amusing in their own contrived-but-buyable way, and the filmmakers are uniformly generous to their excellent ensemble cast, offering each one of them their own confessional or revelatory moment. LaPaglia, a fine actor too often hidden in supporting roles, is especially strong in interrogation sequences where the questions he’s putting to his suspects on the subject of their marriage could equally double back on the interrogator.
Lawrence and Bovell offer a multitude of endings - at least one or two too many, in fact; there’s almost one for every character - but many of the film’s conclusions aren’t as clear-cut as those formulated in, say, The Trigger Effect or Changing Lanes. Only a playwright could hinge the real significance of one pay-off on a remark the cop makes in passing at a urinal earlier in the film, and Lawrence takes particular care to ensure there’s still a distance between the leads as the credits roll. The suburbs *have* become a better place in which to flourish as Lantana reaches its conclusion, but not, we are led to believe, by much.
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