Remember that famous line from Cool Hand Luke? – ‘What we have here is failure to communicate’?
Well, these days there’s not a soul who is not communicating.
All you need is the conviction (in this case unfounded) that you have an interesting story to tell and, with technology being so accessible and affordable, you can shoot it, package it as some sort of insightful take on the human condition, show it to an art-house audience to whom entertainment is considered base and frivolous, and bingo! you’re a lauded filmmaker.
During a recent trip to Sydney, I made time to get to the Verona and see this movie. It had won awards, been decorated with oodles of stars, and was praised lavishly by everybody who’s anybody in the towers of the commentariat.
Halfway through, I was convinced that I had inadvertently wandered into the wrong cinema, so boring was the experience.
Canadian director Sarah Polley has put her own family in the frame as she unravels the truth – or the varying recollections of it – surrounding her dead mother, Diane, an actress/performer of only modest achievement.
Her dourly smoking father is the lynchpin, but siblings and close friends all get plenty of time to speak to camera about an unearthed secret that is revealed early and then pored over ad nauseam.
Writing in the New Yorker Anthony Lane enthused that ‘the very ordinariness of the saga, however, becomes its strength’, but I am afraid I couldn’t disagree more. In fact I found myself champing at the bit, desperately wishing that I was somehow able to let Sarah and her dull clan know that I really could not have cared less about their navel gazing.
That Lane and other critics have been so impressed by such mundane chattering, wanting to pass it off as myth-making, beggars belief. There are a lot of talking heads, none of them projecting much charisma, and far too many images used more than once.
The Polleys’ exposé is repetitive, inconsequential and wildly overrated.
~ John Campbell
