Oscar and Lucinda

National Review, Feb 23, 1998 by John Simon

* Based on Peter Carey's Booker Prizewinning novel, Oscar and Lucinda deals with two eccentric redheads--an Anglican priest from rural England and a rich woman industrialist from Australia who fall, however unconsciously, in love on board ship to Sydney. Besides hair color, they have in common their love of glass (he merely collects it, she also manufactures it) and passion for gambling. She enjoys losing big chunks of her fortune at cards in Sydney's dingy gambling dens; he avidly bets on horses and always wins but, like a good priest, bestows his ill-gotten gains on the needy.

I skip over Oscar's brutalized childhood and Lucinda's cosseted one; also Lucinda's buying Sydney's premier glassworks in partnership with the cultivated Rev. Dennis Hasset, who, secretly in love with Lucinda, buries himself in a remote New South Wales parish. Nor will I itemize the stages of Oscar and Lucinda's slow-motion platonic love affair. Then comes the craziest twist in this relentlessly quirky tale.

Hasset's outback parish needs a church, so Oscar and Lucinda decide to supply one made of glass. Oscar bets Lucinda that he will be able to transport it to that remote outpost. Much of the route is by river, which complicates matters, what with Oscar's phobic fear of water, deriving from his childhood. Mind you, this is a tale from the distant past, narrated in voiceover by the great-grandson of Oscar and Lucinda, even though the two never married and only cohabited once. Humph!

If all this doesn't put you off, and you have a craving to see a glass church sail down a wilderness river--and can live with one of the most preposterous endings in cinematic history--by all means catch Gillian Armstrong's latest, with a screenplay by Laura Jones, who also perpetrated Jane Campion's dismal Portrait of a Lady. Miss Armstrong can direct, and she has a good cast. Ciaran Hinds persuades as the repressed Hasset, Cate Blanchett is winningly mercurial as Lucinda, but I have nagging doubts about the Oscar of Ralph Fiennes. He manages to be, rightly, both nerdy and ardent, spindly and surprisingly persistent, as unmatinee-idolish as they come. But there is something about this carrot-topped leprechaun that I boggle at. Perhaps the absurdity of the whole thing.