The sign on the outskirts of Jindabyne welcomes us to "a tidy town," which should probably serve as fair warning that it's going to turn out to be anything but. This sleepy little Australian hamlet was once nearly lost in a flood, forcing the inhabitants to relocate to higher ground — but as Jindabyne progresses, it becomes abundantly clear that safety was never quite achieved and that, at least allegorically speaking, the floodwaters are still rising.
Jindabyne is the new film from Australian director Ray Lawrence, last heard from some six years ago with Lantana, a movie this latest effort resembles for better and for worse. Like Lantana, Jindabyne is an acquired taste, a leisurely slog through minefields of murky emotions surrounding a soft, creamy center of pure ennui. There's a little soap opera, a lot of angst-ridden staring into the abyss and almost nothing that's remotely going to brighten anyone's day.
What Lawrence and screenwriter Beatrix Christian have cooked up here is a much-expanded version of So Much Water So Close to Home, one of the Raymond Carver short stories Altman included in the multiple strands of Short Cuts. The core event remains unchanged — the discovery of a dead body by four friends on a fishing trip — but Jindabyne adds numerous satellite characters, each with attendant conflicts and crises, relocates the tale from Carver's beloved Pacific Northwest to the wide open spaces of Southeastern Australia and adds a racial dimension by making the dead girl an Aborigine.
Lawrence and Christian's adaptation is audacious but more than a little unnecessary, "fleshing out" Carver's incisive, nine-page story into an oppressively moody, two-hour rumination on the human condition. Nearly a dozen characters are introduced within the film's first 15 minutes, although it's largely up to the viewer to piece together who these people are, how they're connected and what their fatal flaws might be. Various degrees of friction seem to exist everywhere, and the film begins rooting around in these tensions even as it zeroes in on the quartet of fishing buddies embarking on their much-anticipated, yearly trip.
No sooner do the men arrive at their distant, backcountry destination, they discover that aforementioned corpse floating in the river, and — here comes the fuel for the moral dilemma driving Jindabyne — decide to postpone notifying the authorities rather than risk having their hard-earned getaway prematurely terminated.
There's not much discussion on the matter, but charged, lingering looks abound (as well as the odd closeup of fish out of water, desperately gasping for breath), feeding into a sense of emotional disquiet that encourages us to read between the lines. Would these guys have behaved in so cavalier a fashion if the floater had been white? Or a man?
Lawrence piles on the poetic imagery and unsettling ambiguities, apparently nostalgic for that peculiarly Aussie brand of oblique dread that was once the province of fellow Oz directors like Peter Weir in Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave. The movie crawls along like a slug stuck in its own slime trail, its sundry characters gazing unhappily into the distance as the metaphorical storm clouds gather, and portentously mystical vocals drone away on the soundtrack.
Things heat up somewhat as the town gets wind of what the men have done, and the incident becomes a lightning rod for tensions between Jindabyne's various communities — white and black, male and female — but, for the most part, Jindabyne remains a strangely inert and often unpleasant experience. Virtually everybody here looks as painfully constipated by the movie's end as they did at the start, and the only comic relief in sight is a strange little Wednesday Addams wannabe fixated on assassinating various small animals, presumably offerings to the all-powerful gods of morbidity.
There's no shortage of tiny critters being poked and prodded in Surf's Up, too, but with considerably happier results. Pratfalls and other slapstick shtick flourish in the animated animal kingdom of Surf's Up, which even has the dubious distinction of being the first kiddie flick in memory to feature one cartoon character whizzing on another cartoon character's foot (to counteract sea urchin toxins, in case you were wondering).
The cartoon characters in question are penguins, but before you decide to read no further — Omigod, not another penguin movie! — allow me to suggest that the film isn't nearly as painful as what you may be imagining. Surf's Up's humor generally aims closer to droll spoofery than teeth-gnashing cuteness, with the movie assuming the form of an animated mockumentary revolving around the absurdist premise that surfing was invented by the talking penguins who are the film's subjects. The pitch here probably went something like this: Imagine Pixar doing Christopher Guest doing Endless Summer.
These birds aren't the most charismatic or adorable animated characters you'll ever meet, but they're as engagingly self-conscious in front of a camera as anybody on The Office, and their gags often benefit from a seemingly improvised quality in keeping with the whole "reality filmmaking" approach.
Sadly, Surf's Up drifts away from its mockumentary premise during a long, overly generic middle section, but the tone is set by a sprinkling of surprisingly clever sequences, quasi-hip music from the likes of Green Day and even a slyly self-referential appearance by The Dude himself, Jeff "Big Lebowski" Bridges, providing the voice for a fair-feathered Ur-slacker in retreat from the world.
The main character here is a runty penguin named Cody (voiced by Shia LeBeouf), who'd rather be riding waves than sitting patiently on unhatched eggs. The central conflict revolves around the diminutive aspiring surfer's efforts to challenge the arrogant reigning champ, while a parallel drama depicts Cody's relationship with his long-presumed-dead hero, a surfing legend who turns up alive but much changed. There's also a romantic interest on board, natch, as well as loads of quirky sidekicks, including a drug-addled chicken (voiced by Jon Heder) and an otter with Don King hair (James Woods).
All in all, the movie doesn't stray too terribly far from the expected formula, but it's nevertheless a pleasant surprise to see penguins that rarely mug, hug or otherwise pander. (These birds even look the part, from their drowsy, seen-it-all eyes to feathers that double as archetypically shaggy surfer locks.)
The obligatory poop jokes show up — at one point, we even get a penguin couple immersed in a giant pool of glowworm excrement — but the movie coasts along with such a dreamy, stoned-out swagger that it's over practically before we've realized it's gotten started. Which, all things considered, isn't such a bad thing at all.
This article appears in Jun 6-12, 2007.