OSCAR & LUCINDA
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Fox Searchlight Pictures Director: Gillian Armstrong Writer: Laura Jones Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Cate Blanchette, Tom Wilkinson, Clive Russell, Ciaran Hinds, Josephine Byrnes, Richard Roxburgh, Bille Brown.
Some of the fine movies of recent times feature food as the central character: "Babette's Feast," "The Big Night," "A Chef in Love." But never before has a single dish, a small dessert item, figured so prominently that the entire story would not have taken place without it. In "Oscar and Lucinda," two maids in the employ of Oscar Hopkins's father calls the teen- aged boy into the kitchen and offer a taste of their delicious Christmas pudding. Oscar tries a piece and he's in heaven. As he's about to spoon up another morsel, the door swings open: in comes his fanatically puritanical, Pentecostal dad, who throws the pudding and its plate into the fireplace, slaps the boy on the ear, and gives hell to the maids for offering pleasurable provender. The severe, bearded man belongs to a faith--much like the Danes in "Babette's Feast" who dine daily on gruel--that eschews physical pleasure, suggesting that the dessert was produced by Satan, and certainly not the appropriate way to honor God on Christmas day. While Oscar has become too filled with the importance of faith and salvation to turn agnostic, he begins to question his dad's values and, believing he has received a message from God (who talks to him while he tosses a disk at some symbols on the ground), he decides to leave home and sign on to the Anglican faith. Shortly thereafter he becomes a reverend.
"Oscar and Lucinda" leaves out much of the characterization advanced in the novel by Peter Carey, such as the fleshed-out portrait of the man who narrates the story and who is Oscar's grandson. But it more than makes up for the exclusion with perhaps the most gorgeous photography of any film of 1997, "Kundun" not excepted. Portraying an Australia circa 1850 during the reign of Britain's Queen Victoria and the publication of Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species," Gillian Armstrong's leisurely look at God, gambling, gamboling and glass is the sort of film with which a modern American audience can scarcely find universal meaning or even to identify too closely with any of its characters. Yet "Oscar and Lucinda" is a haunting meditation on mores and folkways of a bygone, romanticized era in the history of the British Empire which pulls no punches in denouncing the white man's rape of land settled by Downunder aborigines. Idiosyncratic as all-get-out, Armstrong's reliable adaptation of the Booker-prize winning book compels our attention with its consideration of repressed sexuality, the conflict between earthly pleasures and the contemplation of the heavens, and the singular pairing-up of two square pegs in a society of round holes.
Featuring conscientious performances by the protean Ralph Fiennes and upcoming actress Cate Blanchette (soon to appear in a movie about Elizabeth I), "Oscar and Lucinda" centers on a shy, overly obedient red-haired boy, Oscar Hopkins (Ralph Fiennes) who separates himself from his father's household when the latter's religion proved a mite too fanatical for the adolescent to tolerate. Becoming an Anglican minister, he develops a compulsion to gamble on anything from cards to animals, rationalizing his behavior as a way to add to the coffers to the poor, and, on a more metaphysical level, as a religious experience in itself. As he relates to the equally eccentric heiress, Lucinda Leplastrier (Cate Blanchett), a liberated woman who dresses in slacks like a man and runs a glass-making factory, "Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier. We bet--it is all in Pascal and very wise it is too, that there is a God. We bet our life on it. We calculate the odds, the return, that we shall sit with the saints in paradise. Our anxiety about our bet will wake us before dawn in a cold sweat. We are out of bed and on our knees, even in the midst of winger. And God sees us, and sees us suffer." The two play cards with more passion than most people feel when they make love. In one reckless moment, Cate bets her entire inheritance against Oscar's future legacy that he cannot transport a glass church which she has built to a remote location in Northern Australia by Good Friday, where he is to turn the edifice over to the Reverend Dennis Hasset (Ciaran Hinds), who had been exiled to the sticks for being in the company of the raffish Miss Leplastrier. The midsection of the film becomes a road movie, as Oscar and his band trek through allegedly dangerous areas controlled by aborigines, expecting to deliver the goods to a thoroughly surprised preacher and his congregation.
A key point of the novel which the film hasn't the time or inclination to bare is the motive behind Lucinda's reckless wager. It's not that she has no use for the money she had inherited: she did, in fact, bask in her ownership of the glass works she purchased. But she was plagued by guilt. The money did not belong to her; it was her parents'. More important, she believed that her father stole the money, having overrun land settled by blacks, which he later successfully farmed.
But no matter. Movies are a visual art, and Gillian Armstrong--working with Luciana Arrighi's luxuriant production design, Janet Patterson's striking costumes, and Geoffrey Simpson's resplendent lensing--has splashed the screen with color and a thoroughly adult piece of craftsmanship, while evoking--however sketchily--the conflicts between physical pleasure and the hope of salvation, between Victorian assurance of the existence of God and Charles Darwin's challenge to this certainty, and between a concern for the community's values and a grasping on to one's own notions. She has evoked solid work from Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchette, two oddballs who were made for each other but able to consummate their feelings only at the card table. If we must bring the metaphysical down to earth, "Oscar and Lucinda" is at heart a tale of two lonely people brought endearingly together if only for a second in God's cosmic timetable. Rated R. Running Time: 131 minutes. (C) 1997 Harvey Karten
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