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Jindabyne

Jindabyne (2007)

April. 27,2007
|
6.3
|
R
| Drama Thriller Crime Mystery

Outside the Australian town of Jindabyne, local man Stuart Kane is on a fishing trip with friends when they discover the body of a murdered girl.

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jrwilmott
2007/04/27

This films stirs up those nagging thoughts anchored in feelings about our place in the world. One single failure to do the right thing can be what defines who you are in the eyes of those who live in your community who have hardly shared a few informal greetings. Worse, those who know you best feel badly let down by a single act that really can't be understood by you or them. We all hope that it is an act of heroism that might be our legacy.This film has a casual greatness. It grinds out the message in an almost documentary style about the unwillingness of the protagonists to confront themselves and the resulting fallout on those around them. There is no Hollywood "closure" here for the victim's family. I may never watch this film again, so many scenes hit hard, or stir up those feelings that we are loath to acknowledge, but I urge you to watch it. It really does go places that few movies take you.A final word. I can't think of a more courageous actress than Laura Linney, who has taken that lonely road of tackling truly difficult parts in one project after another with gritty integrity and intelligence.

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Wuchak
2007/04/28

"Jindabyne" (pronounced JIN-da-bine) is a 2006 film about a crisis in an Australian town. Four guys on a fishing trip in the wilderness discover a body of a young woman in a creek, a woman who's part aboriginal; they decide to finish their activities before reporting the body 2 days later. When the press gets ahold of the story the men are criticized for their irresponsibility; their actions are also interpreted as racist by the local native population. Claire (Laura Linney), the wife of one of the men, Stewart (Gabriel Byrne), can't believe they didn't immediately report the body and becomes suspicious of the incident. Meanwhile the killer is on the loose."Jindabyne" combines elements of "Deliverance" (1972) and "Picnic at Hanging Rock" (1975). The similarities with the former are obvious, while it shares the latter's haunting ambiance and overall mysteriousness of the Australian wilderness (albeit Eastern Australia rather than Western).While "Jindabyne" isn't the most captivating piece of celluloid and leaves some aspects unresolved, it did hold my attention and the story provokes numerous insights and questions. For instance, the killer is revealed in the opening shot. This isn't someone frothing at the mouth with evil, but rather an ordinary-looking electrician which shows that there are ordinary-looking people out there who have no qualms about snuffing out a person's life for their own selfish purposes, just as there are people who would steal, molest or falsely testify without a second thought. We shouldn't assume everyone's like us. There are evil people out there who prey on others. If the aboriginal girl had realized this she wouldn't have allowed herself to fall into the killer's grasp.The story gives evidence that the men were fishoholics excited about their adventure and simply weren't prepared to handle the burden and responsibility of a mysterious dead body. Hence, they temporarily blocked out the corpse and continued their endeavors. Later, in the big fight scene with Claire, Stewart admits with all the rage that only guilt can cook up, that it did FEEL GOOD to be fishing for awhile, free from the shackles of his every-day mundane existence in "civilization." But how could it? Maybe because many men have the ability to focus on the moment and, basically, forget, for a while, the circumstances surrounding them.This, I think, director Ray Lawrence portrays effectively in the fishing scene. The scene is a soothing interlude between moments of tension; it's like momentary heaven on earth. And then they remembered the dead body.Many say the movie is about making a stupid decision and the requisite consequences, as well as repentance, forgiveness and compassion. True, but the movie is also about the differences between the way man and woman view and deal with reality. I doubt most women would be able to ignore the presence of a corpse enough to enjoy a fishing holiday, which explains why Claire becomes appalled at the incident. No wonder she looks at her husband as if she doesn't know him; their marriage was already strained and this rips it apart (to say nothing of the weirdo mother-in-law -- she'd give anyone the heebie-jeebies!).Another scene that depicts this difference is when Stewart comes home from the fishing trip in the middle of the night. Feeling guilty and confused, he needs to make love to Claire, to regain a bit of his humanity. Talking about it is not an option, there are simply no words. It's evidently a way for Stewart to "skip" the whole event, to pretend he's not concerned by it.Yet, I think the film is about scapegoating more than anything. A young girl is dead and it's next to impossible to discern who did it, so the community's collective pain is hurled at the four who trivialized her death in order to preserve their holiday. Also, the film obviously compares the men's cavalier disregard with the heartless indifference of the killer himself. Which isn't to say they're as bad as the murderer, not at all, but they do share one of the traits that enables him to do what he does.Theories on the implications of the bee sting: (1) It represents the girl taking some small revenge now that she was one with nature. (2) It showed nature beginning to assert its dominance over this man who professes a psychological link with artificial power, and the way he uses nature to abet his crimes (i.e. hiding in the rocks and disposing of his victims in the stream). (3) It simply shows that his cycle of predation and murder is an eroding one, in that the longer he keeps doing it the more things will happen that are beyond his control, and will eventually lead to his discovery. (4) It signifies how a murderer can kill a person with no remorse or anything, just like killing an insect. And (5) It shows how the killer's still alive since he can feel and react to the bee whereas the girl's dead and gone as her body is unable to feel or react to the insects transgressing her corpse (as depicted in an earlier scene).The only criticism I can voice concerns the corpse of the girl; her body almost looks sexy, which is never the case in real life and even more so in this case since the body's been dead for awhile and lying in a creek under the hot sun. My wife works at a burial park and sees bodies all the time, young and old. Corpses are gross and smelly. Death is never sexy.

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MBunge
2007/04/29

Even in the best of all possible worlds, Jindabyne would have probably been a slow, quiet, unfocused and pretentious film. In this world, however, these filmmakers made an awesomely wrong-headed storytelling decision about half-way through. That inexplicably dumb choice invalidates everything that comes before it and turns everything that comes after in into an almost unendurable, torturous slog.Leading up to that stunningly stupid moment, this movie starts off like a horror movie with a guy in a truck pursuing a young girl in a small car. Then it breaks away from that to introduce us to a large cast of characters. Claire (the lovely Laura Linney) is an American woman living in Australia with her Irish husband Stewart (Gabriel Byrne). They have a young and emotionally delicate son named Tom (Sean Rees-Wemyss) and are one of those couples that sort of drift in and out of being connected to each other. They seem to have a conflict revolving around Stewart's mother infringing on what Claire feels is her familial territory. Claire and Stewart are friends with Carl and Jude (John Howard and Deborra-Lee Furness), an older couple raising their morbid granddaughter Caylin-Calandria (Maya Daniels) after their daughter died. Their conflict seems to be Jude's resentment that Caylin-Calandria survived while her mother died.After spending the first 20 minutes of so of the film acting as though it's going to be a coming-of-age story about the two kids surviving the turmoil of their parents and grandparents, all of that is abruptly thrown aside. Then Stewart, Carl and two other guys head deep into the Australia countryside to fish at a special river. It turns out that the guy in the truck from the beginning of the movie killed the girl and dumped her body in the river. The four fishermen find the girl's body, and here's where whatever might have been right about Jindabyne goes completely and irrevocably wrong. The four men decide to just leave the girl's body where it is and keep fishing for another day before finally notifying the police.The movie goes on after that and physically demonstrates Einstein's theories of the relativity of time, because the second half of this film takes an an eon to get through. There's a whole bit about the public revulsion at what Stewart and the other men did; the complicated marital history of Claire and Stewart; Claire goes on a quest to try and connect with the dead girl's family and atone for Stewart; the killer in the truck shows up a few times for no good reason except to keep the audience awake; we suddenly get a theme about the divide between white Australians and the Aborigines; and the story even comes back to Tom and Caylin-Calandria for a resolution to their little bit and it doesn't fit at all what they were doing in the first part of the film. And aside from Laura Linney doing some very fine acting, as usual, none of the stuff I just described is at all interesting or compelling or enlightening or entertaining. You can't care about any of that and you're left with either turning the movie off or suffering through to the end like a masochist.That's because these filmmakers botch the most important moment of this story and the most important scene in the film. That being the discussion Stewart and the others have about ignoring the dead girl and just fishing like nothing happened. The filmmakers botch it because that discussion never happens. It's not in the film. There's a scene where they find the body and then there's a scene where they're deciding what to do with the body while they're fishing, but we never get to see or hear the conversation about whether they should fish or go for the cops. It never happens.But the characters HAVE to have that conversation and the audience HAS to see them have that conversation. Not just because it's what every group of normal human beings would do, if only to verbally reassure themselves and each other that they aren't vile bastards for ignoring the dead girl, but because that's the moment when the audience is supposed to see who these guys really are, who they think they are and who they think each other is. That conversation is what is supposed to link and infuse everything that comes after it and make us remember and re-examine everything that came before that it. Without that conversation, there's this big, gaping wound in the story and it's all that you feel or focus on.I think the filmmakers did it that way because this film is really about the female characters. Claire and Jude are much more prominent and get far more lines and scenes than Stewart or Carl. In fact, almost all the female characters get more attention than their male counterparts. But the biggest and most powerful moment of the story happens to the 4 male characters. If the film correctly dealt with that moment, it would have to spend more time with those men and shove the female characters off to the side. These filmmakers didn't want to do that, but it is what the story demanded.This is another one of those films where you can really enjoy Laura Linney's performance. She gets a chance to shine the way she can as a woman who shouldn't be that likable on paper but is tremendously involving anyway. The rest of Jindabyne is either tedious or painful to sit through. It's frankly absurd how meaningful these filmmakers thought it would be, while they passed over the most meaningful aspect of the story. It's like the movie has a stroke in the middle of the story and doesn't realize its left side is paralyzed for the rest of the film.Unless you plan on fast forwarding through every scene that doesn't have Laura Linney in it…take a pass on Jindabyne.

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roukee
2007/04/30

Starts with great promise about the story of a town now gone and a new town replacing it. The old town is now under water and there are references to zombies by first the father and then friend of the little Tom. The children (Caylin-Calandria) in the film display a lot of crazy behaviou r for no real good reason. One explanation for all of this is to set the scene - but this film, in cinematic terms, is clearly not a thriller and more of an emotional/psychological drama of people who are already mired by problems, having to deal with more.We see elaborate character building in the film and sometimes it is overdone, especially of characters who are not involved in the main plot. There were too many unanswered questions. Why didn't Stewart and his friends worry about their families back home with a killer loose? Why didn't one or two of them get back to the car and call the police? The film then drags on for a bit and ends with more questions. Why does the murderer chase Claire? Why does he watch the funeral? Beautiful symbolisms and the beautiful Australian landscape make for a haunting movie. Really good acting by all actors, more so by Gabriel Byrne who had me completely convinced that reporting that he'd found a dead body four days too late wasn't really their fault.The beautiful song sung by Susan's (Tatea Reilly) sister Ursula Yovich and her superb acting, bought a tear to my eye.Being a lover of stories with a certain amount of structure, Jindabyne left me unsatisfied.

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