There's this game that I sometimes play when a movie or TV show is particularly mind boggling: "Whatever were they thinking?" I try to envision the moment when the story was pitched or the plot was hatched. I think I've got it for this one.
OK, this is what I think happened. Harvey Keitel--consistently one of the most interesting actors out there and one who has a playful/serious "actor's workshop" approach to his craft, is hanging out, maybe inhaling, maybe slugging back the scotch with his good buddy Jane Campion and her sister Anna. "Hit me with your best shot. Give me the most ridiculous scenario you can come up with. I'll convince 'em."
They put their heads together and come up with a vision of him crawling around the Australian outback in a red minidress and a single cowboy boot--one of these strokes of brilliance the muse occasionally drops on you (especially, as mentioned before, when the smoke is wholly...)
"Great! How did I got there?" "Had to be a woman." AND they were off. The writers had to back into the story, and when they did they realized things got kind of draggy when it was just the dialogue in the desert--a little too heady. Needed some livening up. So whenever the action slowed down they'd roll the dice and add in a feature from a collection of odds and ends they'd written on slips of paper and put in a fishbowl to draw from--sheep as tray tables, reindeer antlers on the car-- a game of dares.
For supporting evidence that this piece was an extended workshop exercise, look to Keitel's 1995 "Smoke" and "Blue in the face" (as in Krishna, blue-faced God?) for the title and spiritual allusion.
Anyway, fun for Keitel and Winslet, some interesting stuff, some too silly stuff. Probably not worth paying for but fun for free.
BTW, this is the second film preview I've attended at Pentagon City, and I don't think I'll go to a movie there again. At the first--Any Given Sunday--the sound track kept breaking up. At this screening they cropped about the top 15% of the image (except for the period in which the film slipped out of registration so we saw the top part but lost the next 15%).
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