"Lantana"is a complicated film - complicated to view and complicated to review. It opens with a tone that's part Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," part O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones." From its initial "Blue Velvet" reminiscent slow pan over a thorny lantana bush to the careful revealing of a corpse, we understand we're in for a somber Australian version of an art film, which is worlds away from the Crocodile Dundee misrepresentation Americans have of Outback cinema.
Director Ray Lawrence reminds one of a subtler Robert Altman. In fact, "Lantana" feels like "Short Cuts" if Altman's epic ambition were reduced to a more focused angle, particularly a concentration on "Short Cuts'" Chris Penn fishing subplot with "Lantana's" Anthony LaPaglia portraying a strikingly similar role to Tim Robbins' cop in the aforementioned Altman film.
Both films leave the viewer with a nostalgic emptiness, a sorrowful and slight illumination about the cyclical nature of life, how relationships are greatly about suffering. And Lawrence masterfully captures this with cinematographic silence and visual precision, from a wide camera shot capturing an Australian shoreline (which bears significant meaning at the end of the film to Geoffrey Rush's character) to a close-up shot of LaPaglia and actress Kerry Armstrong dancing intimately (with the gentle possibility of a kiss that means, in one word, choice).
Choice is key to this film - choices made by characters pushed to the edge. It's intelligent writing from screenwriter Andrew Bovell. We're witnessing people at the fringes, at moments where life is coming to a fine point, a point of no return. At times, the effect has audience members attentively leaning forward, awaiting inevitable collapses.
But the greatest flaw of the film - and it is near fatal - is Lawrence's unnecessarily sluggish pace. Moments could move faster, scenes could build more quickly. The viewing experience could be entirely heightened if Lawrence had sped up the scenes and if first time editor Karl Sodersten had utilized his commercial background to a greater extent and thought in terms of brevity.
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Instead Sodersten treats the film as if its viewers have the patience of the dawn-rising elderly. We don't. We want to find out what happens next and the casualness of the pace only serves to perturb and not deepen. Note to Lawrence - Paul Thomas Anderson holds the camera on characters to haunting effect, so that the viewer is forced to contemplate the choices of the characters, their minds' inner workings. Lawrence's camera holds on the trivial, the secondary, and it all too often disrupts the movie's flow and energy.
Albeit, this complaint (some may argue) is moot. The acting is superb (minus Geoffrey Rush's stoic apathy), the characters are intriguing and Bovell's script handles dialogue skillfully.
But perhaps this review is becoming too pedantic, too much like an art film equivalent, so let's cut the B.S. and get at what truly matters: what people were saying when leaving the theater.
Overheard girl: "I liked it."
Overheard guy: "Yeah, but that was a chick flick. You have to admit, that was a chick flick"
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