Review of Shine (1996) by Lanning : — 30 Jul 2009

It's taken a few beers--uh, I mean a few days--for me to figure out what exactly I want to say about this movie. The first thing I'd like to say -- and you can take it or leave it -- is that the flixster synopsis is, well, let's just say it's not the synopsis I'd write.

If I were doing the synopsis, I'd say probably that we should look for the earliest significant detail in this sorta-biopic "true" story of David Helfgott's roller-coaster life ride.

But I don't even know who Gérard Genette is, so I'll just say this. If you'd like to look to the "source" of the problem in Helfgott's life, you might want to go -- not to his father -- the obvious choice -- but to the little stories Armin Mueller-Stahl, as Helfgott's father, let's surface over the course of the movie.

Remember the violin story? Mueller-Stahl let's that one surface twice. It's the story, incomplete the second time, of how he saved his money to buy a violin, when he himself was a child, and "Do you know what happened to that violin?" The first time we hear the "complete" tale; we hear the conclusion.

David's father's father smashed that violin to pieces. The second time we hear the story, when Geoffrey Rush is finally on board playing the older David, we do not hear the end of the sad story, but we don't need to hear it -- we already know that it was smashed up by David's grandfather.

So what? Well, we might be tempted, on a first viewing, to place an incredible amount of the burden for David's "problems" on his father -- Mueller-Stahl is brilliant in this role. But I would place a cautionary tag on that assumption and argue that the problem goes back at least to some very hairy father-son relationship in the generation that comes before.

A beautiful film, friends. I'm glad it finally bubbled up my rental queue. Last, but certainly not least, kudos to director Scott Hicks. I can't say I've ever seen anything he's done, but this is truly a beautiful job of film direction.