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Truly Dreadful Film

It is a performances centric movie

Admirable film.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

If there are any faults to the 1996 Australian film "Shine", is that it is taken under control of a narrative that is at times very clichéd. Also pretty sketchy is the sequences of events writer/director Scott Hicks puts into the film. But still the film is saturated with sheer brilliance as it tells the tale of piano genius David Helfgott (Geoffrey Rush)as we chronicle his story from the time he was a child, to a troubled young soul to an out of it adult and was played off nothing short of brilliance.We first see Helfgott's problem stemming from his father, Holocaust survivor Polish-Jewish born Peter Helfgott (Armin Mueller-Stahl) who was very domineering in nature as he subjugates him which at times can be both a bit over-the-top but still very compelling to watch. I understand this is a biopic and not a documentary and there's bound to be some sort of dramatization, but it's hard to fully admit it or not if Peter Helfgott was really that cruel to David. Nevertheless it's very impossible that that this cruelty can ever be erased from David's mind and any kind of burden would be difficult to climb."Shine" then transitions towards David's youth to adult years (Noah Taylor and eventually Geoffrey Rush) where he gets the right training and musical experience with legions of friends helping him along the way. We see him succeed through his music to the point where he suffers a nervous breakdown which leads him to fifteen years institutionalized. However, once he's released, he comes back to playing great music in front of packed crowds and we as an audience cheer for his return as he was able to fight his way back to the top. There's a lot of quality behind it and it work effectively. In some ways the format feel very much like a sports film with a formulaic twist, but it's still very good in quality. We have the underdog musician with potential for greatness, then something lures him away, gets out of the jam and then faces the toughest challenge and then beats the odds.Even though underdog stories in movies are quite predictable, but why this one is orchestrated this way is simply because it works. The story is easy to follow through and never cowers away from scenes that can be at times unpleasant for the eyes. The flow of the story just runs naturally. The complexities regarding Peter's fathering towards his son and David's musical skills can be quite layered and compelling.If there was a weakness to "Shine" it would be that the three stages of his life seem to skim over and didn't have a complete disclosure behind it while the interesting scenes usurp the dramatic ones. The transformation between a sensitive kid with a quirky persona to the fragile eccentric can be complex in detail as life struggles David faces we aren't fully invested because it happens right from the early parts of the movie we know his capabilities are right there.Performance wise the acting is really good. Geoffrey Rush is the rightful person to win the Oscar but his role is oddly selected due to the character being the ones that you've seen many times before. The remaining cast members range from solid acting to just going through the routines that Hollywood favours. Aside from that they play off the more natural performance Rush's acting ability to grasp at David's incoherent quirks and limited attention span.Often times Hollywood likes their communications to be delivered very crisply. Very few people grasp or pause for words, it's all delivered straight and to the point and that's very acceptable. When a typical off-camera conversation comes on-camera, it takes the tone aback while the wheels are turning. What makes Rush's performance stand out is that we see a personality that is fractured that's contrary to the normal behaviour from his peers. The whole film may be Oscar inclined, but through Rush's acting this film's worthy to watch.

Pianist David Helfgott (Geoffrey Rush), driven by his father and teachers, has a breakdown. Years later he returns to the piano, to popular if not critical acclaim.I have to say this film did not personally strike me. That is not to say it is a bad film. It is very good film. But just not one that really captured my attention or made me really care about the characters. There is something to be said about talent, genius, mental instability and many other things, and this film says a little bit about each of those. But it did not hit quite hard enough.On the plus side, we have Geoffrey Rush. Today (2015), he is probably better known for his part in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies, but some of us remember when he had some great dramatic roles. This is one, as is his great work in "Quills".

I did some reading after this driven by idle curiosity about the account. The real Helfgott didn't spend 15 years abandoned in a room with a piano, he didn't have to stand in the rain outside of a bar before they would let him in, he was pretty well known in the local scene as a pianist, his father was not a Holocaust survivor and David had been married before, father and son were never really estranged and David was present at his funeral.But the 'objective' point-of-view that purports to explain him, or any of us at any time based on a few facts, is in the end no less hypocritical than any attempt to pass dramatization as 'the real story'. This matters. Someone can be present at a funeral without being truly present, and someone can feel forgotten and alone even when they're factually surrounded by people, estranged from a parent even when formally this was never so.The film is at a simple emotional level where the attempt to conquer a maddening complexity (music, life) snaps the tethers of mind and in due time the reconfiguring of this damage into blossoming art. The moral is that we must keep trying and hope for the best, perhaps the worthiest lesson even if it appears slightly trite in the context of a more or less happy ending. Still, why feel the need to invent all those things, knowing you are doing nothing short of that? When the inflicted violence on the son could be inferred by a more ambiguous tension instead of an outright beating.Because, it seems, we can only choose to accept the lesson if at the center we find a good soul worthy of the saving. In other words, it is not the fact that he gives a great last recital that matters, but that he plays at all, not that a genius was salvaged because he might never have been that, but a human being. And this is what rankles so much Helfgott's piano critics who find him borderline incompetent in his playing - he is cheered on in concerts because he is the character from this film.Ideally we would be able to discern all these points here instead of one harmony: the truly damaged but kind soul, the inability to place blame for that damage on any ogre father or Holocaust, and being able to somehow experience his music (the real Helfgott recorded for the film) as a trained ear would, fixated flourishes followed by distraction and incompetence according to critics, musically extending the damaged self.For a more demanding film on the same subject of madness and transcendent musical genius see a little known film on a medieval composer called Death in Five Voices: all about the dissonance between different voices trying to harmonize a story and this carried in the music itself.

Shine is a very famous movie here in South Australia because it was made by one of our own about one of our own. If it wasn't that this movie made a big impact in the States, earning it some academy awards, it would have sunk into obscurity. As it did go well in America, we begin to raise it to a level that it cannot really hold. Shine is a good movie, I agree with that, and yes it does deserve Academy awards, especially for the actor who played the adult David Helfgott, but I feel that us South Australians have made too much out of this movie.Shine is about David Helfgott, a child prodigy with the piano. He was taught by his father and blitzed the competitions when he was young. He was thus offered tuitions and even given the chance to train in America. Unfortunately his father would not let him. Later he is given a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Music in London, and he goes against his father's wishes and travels to London to learn. His desire to please his father leads him to perform one of the hardest pieces ever written and he ends up having a nervous breakdown which leaves him scarred for the rest of his life.The movie is about his life, but it seems that Hicks wanted to place an importance on David's relationship with his father. This should be the central point of the story. He plays the piece that his father wanted him to play and almost killed himself in the process; the movie finishes with his father's death, yet in the later part of the movie his father, and the relationship with him seems to take a back seat. There is only so much that one can do when one is creating a biography though, yet we can see that his father did have an enormous impact on his life.I call David Helfgott's father Mr Insecurity because that is what he seems to be in the movie. His major goal is the preservation of his family yet the harder he tries to stick it together the further he pushes it apart. When he sees the children beginning to fight over a letter from David's host parents to be in America, he decides that he does not want David to go. This is not the beginning as you can see his displeasure from father go further back. He dislikes the upper class company that David will no doubt start keeping and fears that he will reject his father, who is from the poorer side of society. His father knows his status and is scared that he will loose his son, but he manifests his fears when David demands to go to London, and his father lashes out and disowns his child. Thus instead of keeping the family together, he tears it apart even further.Shine, I think, is an average movie. It does deal with real people going through real things, and Scott Hicks definitely has a talent in creating movies, but I do not think that this movie is really worth all of the praise that people gave it. The only reason it is praised because it is a movie filmed in South Australia that made it to Hollywood.