The Eye of the Storm

Family dramas don't come much fruitier than The Eye of the Storm. Fred Schepisi's film adaptation of Nobel laureate Patrick White's 1973 novel will speak most potently to those for whom the (far superior) Amour was too po-faced by half.

An Australian deathbed drama that is as loopy and overripe as Michael Haneke's French-language Oscar-winner was rigorous and austere, the movie is best thought of as the celluloid equivalent of those pulpy page-turners that go with us on holiday. You may feel guilty for devouring such material, but you'll stay with it to the very last and breathless moment.

And if you're going to have a movie rife with lip-quivering, often sotto voce broadsides, you could do a lot worse than cast Charlotte Rampling, Geoffrey Rush, and Judy Davis as a snippy trio engaged in a familial face-off that never met a close-up it didn't like. All three actors surrender with conviction to a leisurely narrative that is self-consciously outré. And Davis (pictured right with Rush), in particular, is a characteristic marvel, tearing into the role of Rampling's errant daughter (the character is a princess by a since-ended marriage, if you please) as if tackling some neglected theatrical classic - and convincing us along the way that she might actually be the offspring of a colleague, Rampling, who in real life is a scant nine years her senior.

A diligent wig-maker helps sustain the illusion that these two women could belong to different generations while provoking the observation that, coiffed a certain way, Rampling bears a more than passing resemblance to Ingrid Bergman. The plot, meanwhile, plays its own parlour games with King Lear, the dying Mrs. Hunter (Rampling) greeting her children by her capacious bedside, one of whom, Rush's London-based thesp Sir Basil (what else would he be called?), has apparently given so poor a Lear that it risks stripping him of his knighthood. (I like the notion that such honours could in real life be rescinded for bad theatrical behaviour, but I digress.) 

Judy Morris's screenplay hands Rush the bulk of the ruminative voiceover, while Schepisi's visuals move towards and away from the eponymous storm that literalises the volcanic emotions just waiting to erupt. Rising occasionally from her sick-bed to recline elsewhere in the family manse, Rampling is seen sliding in and out of Mrs. Hunter's more sexually voracious youth, against which the titled if impecunious Dorothy lapses tetchily into her adopted French as if by self-aggrandising default: the name, Dorothy, and the actress's inimitable lips only serve as reminders of Davis's superlative turn some years back as Judy Garland on TV.

Rush gets his share of rumpy-pumpy with one of the resident nurses (that would be Alexandra Schepisi's Flora, whom Basil lauds as a "genuine Botticelli"), though not the German housekeeper, Lotte, who is given to performing extravagant bursts of Weimar-era cabaret by the foot of Mrs. Hunter's bed. In a different movie, one might accuse Helen Morse of being rather too much in that role. Here, though, she and her performance feel completely at home. 

Watch the trailer for The Eye of the Storm