Lantana **** Dir: Ray Lawrence With: Anthony LaPaglia, Geoffrey Rush, Barbara Hershey, Kerry Armstrong, Rachael Blake, Vince Colosimo 121 mins, cert 15 www.palace.net.au/lantana
Our palates are in such danger of corrosion from dire action comedies and erotic thrillers that we can only hope that when something as intelligent, involving, ingenious and beautifully acted as this movie comes along, it's still possible to taste it. Ray Lawrence - an Australian commercials director whose last feature credit was an adaptation of Peter Carey's Bliss in 1985 - makes his return to mainstream cinema with this excellent film, positioned somewhere between police procedural and psychological drama. It is at once a thriller, an essay in love, and a darkly playful assertion of the role of coincidence and chance in our lives.
At its centre is an emotional, burnt-out case. Anthony LaPaglia plays Detective Leon Zat, a middle-aged cop in Sydney, bored with life, bored with his marriage, giving vent to his frustrations by beating up culprits and having an affair with a blowsy woman he has met at a local salsa class: Jane (Rachael Blake). His wife Sonja (Kerry Armstrong), the mother of his two teenage sons, is herself drifting into depression for which she is being treated by a famous, glamorous therapist. This is Dr Valerie Somers, played by Barbara Hershey, and her marriage too has fallen into disrepair; Somers's spouse is a law professor played by a cadaverous Geoffrey Rush whose desolate face speaks volumes about the day-to-day anguish they suffer. Their 11-year-old daughter was killed, and they live their lives in a state of muted grief and displaced rage. The hidden web of interconnections between all these fraught lives comes to the surface when Dr Somers goes missing.
LaPaglia gives a very humane performance as Zat, a man accelerating and worsening his mid-life crisis by trying to tough it out. He has taken up jogging, for no other reason than to get out of the marital home. It is a pastime he pursues with the utter lack of pleasure he appears to find in every other aspect of his life. He puffs and winces, excruciated with chest pains - which recur horribly in joyless mid-coitus with his other woman. For one jogging stint, director Lawrence orchestrates a head-on collision between him and a luckless pedestrian who collapses into unexplained tears when Zat bellows furiously at him, covered in blood. It is a bizarre event which has a kind of cosmic parallel when Dr Somers, on the edge of breakdown, shouts at an innocent passer-by in the street, and the shaken victim recounts this event to Zat who in turn tells him about the jogging incident: "I just held him in my arms, but part of me was saying: 'Pull yourself together you weak prick; the rest of us have to!' "
Pulling themselves together as best they can are Dr Somers and her husband, acting out an infernal minuet of tasteful, marital despair. Hershey is dealing with the loss of her daughter by writing a cathartic, bestselling book about it. He not-so-secretly loathes this commodification of their daughter's memory and contents himself with secret journeys to the site of her death, placing tiny bunches of flowers on the spot. Rush elegantly conveys the froideur of his self-loathing, which warms into a kind of lizard-like hostility when LaPaglia's cop makes it clear that he is suspect number one in his wife's disappearance.
Thus, the upper- and middle-class strata of this drama. At the blue-collar level, Zat's mistress Jane - embittered by the way her affair with Zat is petering out - conducts a manipulative contest with her next-door neighbour, a married nurse whose domestic happiness eats her up with envy. And the upshot of this envy, one of the most unexpected and satisfying jabs the movie aims at us, makes the narrative's mechanism of coincidences click shut like an elegantly designed box.
Alongside the dark themes are marvellously persuasive elements of humour and touching humanity. As Sonja, Kerry Armstrong conveys great gentleness in her own longing for human contact, now restricted to the protective but self-conscious embrace of her adolescent sons. "I like the lines around my eyes," she poignantly tells Dr Somers. "I'm not sure if my husband does."
The coincidences in the movie are audaciously choreographed in such a way as to test the perimeter of believability without ever quite leaving the realm of realism. It is different from the stylised patterning of, say, Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, coming closer to the carpentry of an old-fashioned, well-made play. In fact the screenplay has been adapted by Andrew Bovell from his original theatre piece, Speaking in Tongues. The coincidences are actually what give the movie its distinctive flavour and raise it above the stereotypical. It is just so refreshing to see a thriller with an IQ this high. It is a film for grown-ups, and this outstanding Australian movie makes a lot of the comparable English-language product from America and Britain look pretty lame. Rarely are sexuality and fear portrayed as compellingly, and as subtly, as this.
