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Seen under bright light, 'Shine' wilts
Actor offers more stunt than performance
February 11, 1997
Web posted at: 4:30 a.m. ESTFrom Movie Reviewer Paul Tatara
(CNN) -- There are a lot of unwritten rules that an actor needs to follow if he or she hopes to hit it big in the movie industry. Never share the screen with animals or children; they just upstage you. Never star in a western unless Clint Eastwood is involved. Always follow your first hit with the same performance disguised by a different hair cut.
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After seeing "Shine," I'd like to officially add one more dictum to this list -- if you really want an Oscar nomination, 'competently' impersonate a mentally or physically handicapped person ... the more sudsy the movie, the better.
These performances fall under two headings. One is the type Daniel Day-Lewis gave in "My Left Foot" -- gripping, honest and steadfastly unsentimental. Most, however, fall into the Dustin Hoffman/"Rain Man," Tom Hanks/"Forrest Gump" category, where a talented actor throws all sense of subtlety to the wind and blathers on in a theatrically deranged manner for two or more hours.
The resulting fireworks dazzle most audience members, who are bored stiff by endless months of the Hollywood same-old, same-old. Others have to fight the slowly escalating urge to climb on-screen and slap the actor silly. Or just slap the silly actor.
Gotta stop talking
Which leads to Geoffrey Rush's much-ballyhooed performance as David Helfgott, the troubled piano prodigy whose true story is the basis for "Shine." I've never seen any footage of the actual Mr. Helfgott, but regardless of his misfortunes (and the film presents many), Rush's stream of consciousness mode of delivering dialogue, with words and vague ideas breathlessly tumbling out on top of each other, begins to grate like fingernails running down a 200-yard-long blackboard. (One sample outburst sums it up quite succinctly -- "I've gotta stop talking I've gotta stop talking that's a problem isn't it?")
Like Hoffman in "Rain Man," Rush's approach to the role comes off more like a stunt than a performance. After a while, I lost all sense of the character and simply began wondering if he could possibly carry on like this for the entire film. He doesn't, but only because he doesn't appear until half way through the story ... which is basically why I think "Shine" is a half-decent movie. Nowadays, though, half-decent is 50 percent better than practically everything else playing at the movies, so Rush and director Scott Hicks have been the lucky recipients of a staggering amount of mostly unearned praise.
In the time-honored tradition of "Rocky," "E.T.," and "Jesus of Nazareth," "Shine" follows the rise, fall, and resurrection of a character whose trials and tribulations are made all the more poignant by the fact that the people around him never quite grasp just how special he really is.
Glassy-eyed
Jan Sardi's screenplay starts out very promisingly with an elementary school talent show performance from David (played as a child by Alex Rafalowicz). The glassy-eyed audience springs to life when this awkward, unassuming child begins masterfully pounding out a Chopin polonaise on a rickety old piano. The piano, which is on wheels, begins slowly rolling across the stage. David trots behind it without missing a note.
We then follow David home, where we get our first taste of his father, an embittered concentration camp survivor played with a bottomless supply of gruffness by Armin Mueller-Stahl. After the horror of having his parents taken from him by the Nazis, David's father wants nothing to do with anyone but his immediate family. He seems to get no joy from anything in his life except classical music and young David's astounding ability to play it on the family's piano.
There is a very nice, gentle scene in which the father enters the darkened living room as his son attempts to learn a new piece of music, then sits down next to him on the bench, but most of Mueller-Stahl's scene resonate with rote bitterness. Most European Jews proudly did the best they could after the unspeakable horrors of World War II to get on with their lives, but Mueller-Stahl's character is presented as little more than a selfish ogre.
By the time the father refuses to let the teen-age David (Noah Taylor) go to America to study via a scholarship given by Isaac Stern, David has been emotionally and physically tortured beyond repair. The film is still going strong at this point, but this is where the storytelling starts to get a little vague, and the filmmaking starts to get pretty shoddy.
David finally (and, by the contents of the film, quite unbelievably) rebels against the old man and leaves to study at the Royal College of Music. Under the tutelage of his gregarious professor, played by John Gielgud, David takes it upon himself to learn his estranged father's favorite piece of music -- Rachmaninov's impenetrably difficult Piano Concerto No.3.
Endless litanies
This sequence, one of the most enjoyable in the film, culminates when David suffers a poorly defined breakdown and collapses, along with the rest of the movie, after masterfully performing the piece on stage.
The story now jumps to the present day, where we find the grown David, now played by Rush, convalescing in a home for the mentally ill. The twist that gets thrown in is that somehow (and, believe me, quite inexplicably) women are immediately charmed by David's endless chatter and unsolicited breast groping.
The film suddenly becomes an endless litany of, well, endless litanies. Two thousand mile-an-hour musings on not much of anything follow, while David is passed from woman to woman like a mentally unstable Olympic torch.
David gets a job playing piano in a small cafe, where the patrons, stunned by his musical talent, fawn all over him. Fair enough, but by the time Lynn Redgrave, of all people, shows up and starts falling in love with this sweaty, motor-mouthed nudnick you have to start asking yourself a few questions. For instance, what the hell is going on here?
Fasten your seat belts -- here come the Oscar nominations.
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