The Eye of the Storm - film review

Judy Davis and Charlotte Rampling are formidable in this carefully faithful adaptation of Patrick White’s most garlanded novel
26 January 2015

Any film that includes Charlotte Rampling, Judy Davis and Geoffrey Rush ought to be worth a look. Added incentive comes from the fact that this Australian production is a carefully faithful adaptation of Patrick White’s most garlanded novel.

The director is veteran Fred Schepisi, one of the New Australian Cinema’s chief proponents who made the ground-breaking Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith in 1978. Rampling appears as a society grandee, Elizabeth Hunter, now in the throes of petulantly dying, whose son and daughter arrive, from England and France respectively, to do the decent thing by her. They also want her money and are quite clear that the relationship has always had its ups and downs.

The son, Basil Hunter (Rush), is a knighted actor of some renown even if his recent Lear has not been a success. He is accustomed to being his mother’s darling and a womaniser. Accordingly, he makes a beeline for one of her nurses, who gladly accepts his embraces until he mentions that she is not the sort of companion he wants to take back to England.

A more intriguing character is the daughter, Dorothy (played by Davis, actually only a few years younger than Rampling in real life). She is recently divorced from a rich and noble Frenchman, can’t stand her mother’s colonial snobbery and is in a state of neurotic mid-life muddle. She no longer knows what she wants or even who she is. An actress we haven’t seen on our screens very often in recent years, Davis is as formidable as Rampling (in heavy, ageing make-up and a wig).

Both do splendidly through a long film that never quite gets to grips with the weight of White’s 600-page novel but trundles along in its well-mounted way.

It is funny and sad in patches, but never comes completely alive, perhaps because there isn’t a single character with whom you can feel fully in sympathy.

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