Review of Lantana (2001) by Alex M — 16 Jan 2004

[size=3]A tapestry of marriages on the edge of tragedy, this Australian film is suprisingly poignant and yet also oddly unsettling. Like [i]Magnolia [/i]in its ability to focus on a large group of characters while seeming to be completely unified, [i]Lantana [/i]uses the disappearance of a woman as the linking point for all of its central characters.

And yet, the disappearance is somewhat secondary in the film to the focus on relationships with buried secrets and unexpressed feelings. Geoffrey Rush and Barbara Hershey play a couple who lost their daughter years ago and who now have seething resentment about the ways in which each copes with that loss.

Hershey, a psychiatrist, has written a book detailing her own feelings about the loss, while Rush prefers to hide behind an air of indifference. Another central character is Leon Zat, wonderfully played by Anthony LaPaglia as a police officer who has suppressed his feelings for so long that he is now starting to explode in anger at grossly inappropriate times.

There are other characters in the film, as well, and they are linked in ways that some would complain was too coincidental...a complaint that would miss the entire point of this film. What [i]Lantana [/i]so successfully evokes, like [i]Magnolia[/i], is that we are all linked not only by chance encounters but also by the emotional similarities we have, and by the way we handle our relationships.

In addition to its dramatic weight, [i]Lantana [/i]is also immensely successful at conveying an extremely effective sense of imminent danger and doom. The disappearance of one of the central characters (I will not reveal which one) leaves the viewer constantly uneasy and also suspicious of almost every other character.

This undercurrent of mystery and suspense adds tension to otherwise mundane domestic scenes, and only serves to accentuate the feeling that each relationship portrayed in the movie is hanging on by a thread.

With a masterful command of story, theme, performance and character, Australian director Ray Lawrence and screenwriter Andrew Bovell (adapting the work from his own play) have crafted a very good film that succeeds on multiple levels and perhaps demands repeated viewings.

[i]Lantana [/i]was one of the best films of 2001.[/size].