Jindabyne by Paul Bullock

You wouldn't think so to watch it, but Jindabyne is based on a short story. An ambitious but frustrating film ripped and embellished from the pages of Raymond Carver's So Much Water So Close To Home (also used in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts), Ray Lawrence’s third directorial effort explores the sensitive relations between white Australians and their aboriginal neighbours. However we begin, rather confusingly, not with the grounded drama you'd expect from such a film, but with a Wolf Creek-esque serial killer sequence in which we see a young aboriginal girl hunted and killed by a sleazy middle-aged white man.

She plays a vital part in the plot eventually, but before then the film shifts gear for the first of many times into a kitchen sink drama in which we are introduced to our vast cast of characters. Primary among them are Claire (Laura Linney) and Stewart (Gabriel Byrne), a married couple who already have one young child and are expecting another. They appear to be happy, but their smiling facade masks an unhappy life of unfulfilled potential and regret, something exacerbated by the fact Claire ran out on Stewart after the birth of their son.

All these tangled up emotions finally come to a head when Stewart finds the dead girl’s body while fishing. Instead of swiftly reporting the discovery to the police though, he ignores it and continues his fun. It’s a move which should create a film full of moral and ethical questions, but so quick is the character’s mind made up that the moment loses any sense of drama and, more importantly, resonance with the audience. After all, no matter how badly we want to escape our stresses, how many people would leave a dead body to continue rotting?

Such troubles aren’t helped by a script which is overlong and overstuffed. Screenwriter Beatrix Christian has seemingly got nervous that a short story may not provide the film with enough substance and so goes about filling it up with superfluous themes, subplots and characters. Some, such as Stewart’s son’s obsession with a submerged local town, generate an eerie, ghostly atmosphere, but others, notably a young girl’s troubles with her foster parents, wouldn‘t seem out of place in Neighbours.

On the plus side, Linney and Byrne put in superb performance while cinematographer David Williamson paints the Aussie outback with a stunning mix of beauty and hostility. However, their efforts are undermined by the film’s excesses and despite Lawrence and Christian’s admirable ambition you leave the cinema pondering not morals and ethics, but just how a short story could become so long and bloated.