Shine

This movie is definitely in my top five favorite movies of all time. It is unbelievably brilliant. Geoffrey Rush, dare I say, is perhaps the greatest actor of modern times. His performance alone is worth watching, let alone the outstanding supporting cast! Definitely not in typical Hollywood fashion, the movie is a truly great indie film. A must see for music lovers and indie film lovers alike.

David is a stuttering, rambling man having suffer a complete breakdown as a young man. However when he was a child his skills on the piano were unmatched. Driven by his father, opportunities open up in front of him to go abroad to learn, but his father denies him the chance. He leaves for London where he drives himself to the point of exhaustion before coming back home to find his father has disowned him.

It took me years to finally watch this film. I was still in Northern Ireland when it came out in the cinema and such films were not permitted to cross our borders, lest they keep the latest action movies from our 1 or 2 screen cinemas! So away from the hype and the Oscar hoopla I sat to watch this film and found myself easily taken in by it. The story is the true story of David Helfgott who was a boy genius before his breakdown. The film starts with him as an adult then jumps back to see him as a child. This approach works well to allow us to see the `end result' as it were, before we see what would be considered the causation factors. These factors are a little heart breaking to watch but they are very well delivered. As an adult, David is comic, warming and tragic. The pain in his life is brought out very well.

A great deal of the praise for this must lie with the wonderful cast. Rush got his Oscar of course and I'll leave it to the users on the message boards to argue over whether or not you can be the lead actor with screen time of less than half the film! He is great, walking a difficult line with a `disabled' character but managing not to just make it a caricature at any point. David as a child is very well played by Rafalowicz and does more of the development work than Rush and hence gets less credit than he deserves for making us care for the adult David. Mueller-Stahl is as good as he can be and gives a great performance, the only downside being that he doesn't age a single day between the adult and child sections of the story - surely some makeup could have been used?

Overall this is a very enjoyable human story that is driven by several really strong performances in key roles. The story keeps it's tone light but yet still manages to be dramatic and, in some scenes far too touching to avoid being slightly moved. The music is beautiful when it is called on to be and dramatic at other times - the director does very well to make the intense music translate into intense scenes in the film. Overall a simple story of a man but one that is interesting and a lot more moving that I expected it to be.

SHINE (1996) **** Geoffrey Rush, Noah Taylor, Alex Rafalowicz, Armin Mueller Stahl, Lynn Redgrave, Sir John Gielgud, Googie Withers. Excellent Oscar nominated bio pic about acclaimed Australian pianist virtuoso David Helfgott (played equally brilliant by Rush {deservingly winning the Oscar as Best Actor} as an adult, Taylor as a young man and Rafalowicz as the child prodigy) who suffered mental anguish thru his art largely due to his overbearing father (Mueller Stahl, Best Supporting Actor nominee, in a demanding yet effective role) that led to his nervous breakdown that nearly destroyed him. Poignant and beautifully directed by newcomer Scott Hicks (Best Director nominee), the film never panders, preaches or offers any simple answers yet does depict mental illness earnestly with devestating clarity. Rush gives a bravura performance that deserves a standing ovation. Best sequence: the lead-in to Helfgott's crash as he attempts the monumental musical challenge, Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto #3, or notoriously known as "The Rach 3".

When I originally saw this film in the mid-90's, I was absolutely devastated throughout the first forty-five minutes. So much so, I was pretty much uncontrollably weeping, much to the chagrin of the friend I went with. Time has softened the film a lot for me, but it still remains a powerful, tender and somewhat inspirational film about a piano prodigy who has led a pretty tragic life. Geoffrey Rush is unbelievable as the piano prodigy David Helfgott, and although the film is kind of sewn up a little quickly with the Vanessa Redgrave subplot (what about Helfgott made her so in love with him in a short period of time as to want to marry him?) it is a very well done film that I highly recommend to just about anyone, but especially musicians and music lovers.

--Shelly

Okay, so I did some reading after this driven by idle curiosity about the account. The real Helfgott didn't spend 15 years abandoned in a room with a piano, he didn't have to stand in the rain outside of a bar before they would let him in. He was pretty well known in the local scene as a pianist, his father was not a Holocaust survivor and David had been married before. Father and son were never really estranged and David was present at his funeral.

But just the same, the 'objective' point-of-view that purports to explain him, or any of us at any time based on a few facts, is in the end no less hypocritical than any attempt to pass dramatization as 'the real story'. This matters. Someone can be present at a funeral without being truly present, and someone can feel forgotten and alone even when they're factually surrounded by people, estranged from a parent even when formally this was never so.

The film is at a simple emotional level where the attempt to conquer a maddening complexity (music, life) snaps the tethers of mind and in due time the reconfiguring of this damage into blossoming art. The moral is that we must keep trying and hope for the best, perhaps the worthiest lesson even if it appears slightly trite in the context of a more or less happy ending.

Still, why feel the need to invent all those things, knowing you are doing so? When the violence inflicted on the son could be inferred by a more ambiguous tension instead of an outright beating.

Because, it seems, we can only choose to accept the lesson if at the center we find a good soul worthy of the saving. In other words, it is not the fact that he gives a great last recital that matters, but that he plays at all; not that a genius was salvaged because he might never have been that, but a human being. And this is what rankles so much Helfgott's critics who find him borderline incompetent in his playing - he is cheered on in concerts because he is the character from this film.

Ideally we would be able to discern all these points here instead of one harmony: the truly damaged but kind soul, the inability to place blame for that damage on any ogre father or Holocaust, and being able to somehow experience his music (the real Helfgott recorded for the film) as a trained ear would, fixated flourishes followed by distraction and incompetence according to critics, musically extending the damaged self.

For a more demanding film on the same subject of madness and transcendent musical genius see a little known film on a medieval composer called Death in Five Voices: all about the dissonance between different voices trying to harmonize a story and this carried in the music itself.