Jindabyne (2007) Movie Information:

Jindabyne (2007) Directed by: Ray Lawrence Jindabyne (2007) Written by: Beatrix Christian Jindabyne (2007) Cast: Laura Linney, Gabriel Byrne, Deborra-Lee Furness, John Howard, Leah Purcell

Jindabyne (2007) U.S. Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics Jindabyne (2007) U.K. Distributor: Revolver

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Jindabyne (2007) Synopsis:

A modern day adult ghost story. Outside the Australian town of Jindabyne, local man Stuart Kane (Gabriel Byrne) is on a fishing trip with friends when they discover the body of a murdered girl. What follows will change their lives forever. It is Stuart's wife Claire (Laura Linney) who must undertake a redemptive journey to lay the dead girl to rest.

Jindabyne (2007) Movie Review:

Through much of the works of the writer Raymond Carver run themes of isolation and inability to connect. Stuart and his friends go fishing, and find a dead body in the river. They decide to tie her to a branch so she doesn’t float downstream, and continue their fishing trip. They’ll alert the police when they get home. Doesn’t seem like a big deal. She’s already dead, after all. Can’t help her now.

They report the death when they return from the fishing trip. Stuart’s wife, Claire, doesn’t understand. How could he just leave her? And how could he come home and make love to her before telling her about it? Stuart doesn’t get what the fuss is about. It’s a shame, but she was dead anyway. He is left alienated by his wife’s obsession with the matter.

This movie, based on Carver’s short story “So Much Water, So Close to Home,” is the second adaptation of the material; it was also woven into Robert Altman’s mosaic “Short Cuts.” The latter was set in Los Angeles but “Jindabyne” is a much expanded version set in the town of Jindabyne in New South Wales, Australia. Through this transformation, the spirit of Carver’s work remains as it did in “Short Cuts” even during Altman’s most radical departures from the work. Carver’s stories are, despite (or because of) their intimacy, universal.

Gabriel Byrne plays Stuart in this adaptation; his performance is key to the entire picture, for it is essential we understand his point of view. When he is out in the mountains, fishing with his buddies and completely cut off from his family and town (even the mobiles don’t get a signal), it doesn’t seem like such a shocking thing to do. And they have a good trip. They catch fish, have a laugh, put the dead girl out of mind (there is a powerful scene later where Stuart’s wife presses him till he admits that he had a good time on the trip). It’s not until they get home, and everyone in the town hears what they did, that they get a new moral perspective on the incident. They didn’t think, for instance, of how the family of the dead girl was going to respond to their negligence.

However the story is not particularly moralistic, or at least not in any preachy sense. It offers more questions than it does answers. During all this, Claire stands devotedly by Stuart in public, but her mind becomes increasingly troubled by the thought of the dead girl and her family. In this version, the girl is black, the men white, and a certain tension arises between the communities. Stuart becomes angrier with the way he is being treated, but beneath the anger you sense uncertainty - he isn't trying to justify what he did to everyone else; he's trying to justify it to himself. Claire, brilliantly portrayed by Laura Linney, feels herself responsible to some degree for her husband’s actions; or maybe she just wants to help the grieving family. Most of her attempts are futile, and the ending has an appropriate ambiguity. The issues in this movie are not easily resolved, and neither are your feelings watching it.

The film was directed by Ray Lawrence, whose last work was the brilliant “Lantana.” In both “Jindabyne” and that one, he used only natural light and, whenever possible, did everything in one take. Yet both these pictures have a visual elegance and a consistent tone; aside from that, they both look deeply into the weirdness behind ordinary human interaction, and the barriers that we build around ourselves.

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Jindabyne (2007) review written by: Adam Whyte