The Crucible

National Review, Jan 27, 1997 by John Simon

THE Australian Shine is yet another of those films surrounded by an aura of rapt veneration. It is the more or less true story of David Helfgott, the son of Peter, a Polish-Jewish refugee many of whose kin perished in the Holocaust. As a child, Peter scrimped for a violin, which his father prevented him from mastering. But Peter has taught his young son to play the piano. David proves a child prodigy, although Peter has great difficulty letting him go for lessons with a professional teacher nearby. When an offer comes for David to study in America, Peter puts his foot down: the family must not be broken up.

It is typical of this film written by Jan Sardi from a story by Scott Hicks, who also directed, that we find out next to nothing about Peter and his pathology -- not even what he does for a living. David's talented siblings are dimly glimpsed in the background; his mother is a household drudge verging on a mute zombie. Yet we need to know more about this family Peter so desperately wants to hold together. Only his madly contradictory behavior toward David takes on a little life, largely because Armin Mueller-Stahl is an actor good at being quietly, ominously scary. But occasional telling details do not connect into a story: the filmmakers mistake being artily elliptical for art.

Again, the now somewhat older David's friendship with an elderly writer, Katharine, could be something touching and revelatory, especially as it is she who helps the youth defy his father and go off to study at London's Royal College of Music. But this, too, is sketched in with disjointed dabs, and nice as it is to see Googie Withers again, her Katharine is not allowed to register properly. In London, David studies with the splendidly eccentric Cecil Parkes, and because the magnificent John Gielgud brings a jovially demonic glow to a cliched role, the teacher - student scenes have some crackle to them.

Here it must be pointed out how musically unsophisticated the film is. David's ambition all along, fanned by Peter, is to play the Rachmaninov Third, or Rach 3, as they keep calling it. Rach 3 is presented as the Everest of pianism, the summit of artistic greatness and pianistic difficulty, which is hysterical hogwash. It is a pleasant piece that professional players easily toss off. Yet one of the climactic scenes here is David's performing Rach 3 with the Royal College student orchestra as Parkes gloats in the audience.

The scene pulls out enough stops to make a mere piano seem like an organ. At times the music ceases and David is banging away at dead keys; then again playing the piano becomes a cross between a day in the salt mines of Siberia and soaring into the ether with Mme Blavatsky. That Noah Taylor, who plays the middle David, is supremely unattractive -- especially with long, flying tresses dripping pianistic sweat -- doesn't help. At the end of the performance, David passes out -- the beginning of a breakdown that will keep him, unable to play, in mental institutions for years.

It is typical of the filmmakers to linger over David's glasses with their thick frames, and Peter's with their thin ones. In the last meeting between the father who has expelled and repudiated his son, and the grown son who keeps slobbering about "Daddy," one of Peter's lenses is even cracked. A reminder that David's fell off his face as he conked out after Rach 3. This is banal and pretentious filmmaking whose empty glasses are supposed to fill up with profound human and symbolic significance. Similarly, David's obsession with water (unexplained) is supposed to be fraught with deeper implications, but remains a mere nuisance as David runs around bare-arsed, keeps taking baths, and creates floods in the bathroom. At one point he even, touchingly, defecates into his bathwater.

So it is quite a mystery why the poised Gillian should fall in love with the gibbering David: since his breakdown, he has not stopped a rapid-fire, near-nonsensical chatter. Reader, she marries him. To be sure, she is an astrologer, and his chart, which she draws up on her computer, augurs favorably. Still, to those of us astrally challenged, this is the final insult. But everything ends well as David is concertizing again. Since Helfgott is no Pollini or Kissin, it would be even better if instead of starting to play he just stopped his prattle.

Geoffrey Rush, a noted Australian stage actor who can also play the piano a bit, is amazingly likable as the third and most garrulous David; his gibberish drops as cheerfully from his lips as his constant cigarette dangles from them. Lynn Redgrave is pleasant as Gillian, but the film is unable to convey why she would overflow with love for a bathroom-overflower. It ends with the couple's visit to Peter's grave in a pretty cemetery; this is meant to be an uplifting, conciliatory closure, but is merely a stereotype.

All the classical music heard in the movie has been arranged by David Hirschfelder and Ricky Edwards, whoever they are. It is all about bringing high culture to the masses, yet if the likes of Rachmaninov, Liszt, and Chopin must be adapted and diluted, instead of on Rach 3, the film should have concentrated on "Three Blind Mice."