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88Lawrence delves deep into the moral dilemma at the heart of Carver's deceptively simple tale. By deliberately making the young woman in the river aboriginal, the film also opens up yet another dimension in the reaction to the men's inaction: Would they have acted any differently had the murder victim been white?
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The same organic characterizations that marked Lawrence's acclaimed 2001 film "Lantana" will attract fans of strong adult drama.
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80Jindabyne wears its class politics lightly, weaving them into a ghost story about the intimate connection between how we treat our living and our dead that will hover around your shoulders long after you leave the theater.
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80Jindabyne's strength and power come from a number of factors: its origin, its current landscape and the unusual way its writer-director, Ray Lawrence, has chosen to work.
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75While not everything in Jindabyne works, especially in its final, redemptive third, the film and its faces stay with you.
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75Above all, this story is about the peril that lurks under life's surfaces.
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75Dublin-born Byrne and native New Yorker Linney...are both exceptional at depicting characters about to burst from inner turmoil, and Linney, in particular, is heartbreaking.
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75Deliberately paced, with an eerie, country-ish score from the Australian singer/songwriter Paul Kelly, Jindabyne is definitely a mystery. But it's not about who killed the woman - audiences know that practically from the outset.
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75The result is a mature and challenging motion picture, and something that will stick with viewers after the screen has gone dark.
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75Jindabyne -- named for the lakeside town in which the troubles spill -- can't contain all that the filmmakers want to throw in. Best to keep glued to the taut performance by Laura Linney.
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75At its core, the story is a Mars vs. Venus case study.
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75Jindabyne is uniquely Australian, dealing with Australian issues, and it boasts a wickedly wry conclusion that -- for everything that has come before -- is karmically just.
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75In the end, it's all a bit too self-consciously mysterious and Lawrence leans a bit too much on the atmosphere to do the work for him as he builds to a frustrating ending. But his vision of a place haunted by a restlessness it can't define proves unsettlingly infectious.
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75Writer-director Ray Lawrence, well regarded for his two previous films, "Bliss" and "Lantana," expands Carver's work into an indictment of colonialism and an examination of the chasm that supposedly exists between men and women over matters of the heart.
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70I wish one-tenth of the films I saw were made with this much craft and integrity, this much intuitive understanding of where to put the camera, how much of the story to explain in words (not much) and how much to trust his outstanding cast to carry the film with their voices, faces and bodies.
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70Hand it to Lawrence and Christian. Jindabyne is a soberly, if sluggishly, crafted movie in which the bitterness never stops.
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70The real flaw is that the movie's best features -- the aching clarity of its central performances -- threaten to be lost in a wilderness of metaphor and mystification.
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70Never obtains the full impact of its potentially powerful inner core.
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70Too many extraneous elements have been added--the victim here is an aborigine, which prompts a racial backlash against the men and their families--but at the movie's center lies the knotty story of a marriage poisoned by amorality.
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67Never manages to get its relationships framed in as sharp focus as "Lantana" and goes down some unproductive side roads in its attempt to get to the point.
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63Where it works best is in the domestic dance of death between a husband and a wife. Linney flutters with increasingly panicky intelligence throughout the film, while Byrne sinks further into his own bulk.
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63Lawrence too often errs on the side of embellishing details that didn't need to be expanded upon.
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63Adapting a great short story, like Carver's "So Much Water So Close to Home," into a movie poses a dilemma: How to flesh it out to feature length without destroying what made it great in the first place?
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60A great idea is weighed down by an over-egged screenplay, but the setting and cast bring out its best.
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60Scene by scene, Jindabyne has dramatic force, but it's an awfully long slog. Carver's smartest tactic was never outstaying his welcome.
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50Jindabyne suffers from too many extraneous elements and from a story that doesn't land with enough force or purpose.
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50Has some strong acting. But largely because of its glacial pacing, the story ends up feeling too detached to move us as it should.
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50Jindabyne started with a bad idea and the finished film doesn't do well by it.
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50Sometimes, the sincerest form of tribute is inferiority. Watching the Australian film Jindabyne, one soon embraces the conclusion: Robert Altman did this work better. And with fewer brush strokes.
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25A depressing and tedious movie.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 3 out of 5
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Mixed: 1 out of 5
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Negative: 1 out of 5
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MichaelE.4
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