Screen
Alleva, Richard
A WORD OF DISSENT THIS 'PIANO' IS OUT OF TUNE he Piano, written and directed by Jane Campion, has been touted as the art house masterpiece of early winter. It certainly displays all the...
...And, for the climax of the movie, Campion has contrived a dreamily powerful, Lawrentian sequence in which Ada's piano nearly destroys its owner when she tries to renounce it...
...Under the opening shots, we hear Ada's inner voice on the soundtrack flippantly remarking that she doesn't understand her muteness...
...For the most part he flails about, searching for some connection between his own romantic temperament and the unromantic stuffiness of the character as written...
...Ada's feelings about sex are crucial to the dramatic development of The Piano, for her progress toward sexual fulfillment is the central action of the movie...
...And, unable to do a convincing New Zealand accent, he falls back on that old acting standby, The Accent from Another Galaxy...
...For land, Stewart sells the piano, a violation of his wife's inner being...
...I can think of only one: near the end, Ada's jealous husband spares her lover's life upon learning that he too has never heard Ada's voice...
...The child actress Anna Paquin fully responds to Campion's direction, making the daughter a sprite reminiscent of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter...
...There are sights in The Piano that wow us but few of them guide us into the hearts of her characters, and they certainly don't add up to the satisfying Gothic love story that Campion has declared she was trying to make...
...I could...
...is stilled once the story is underway and isn't heard again until the end of the movie...
...Lawrence seems to be the dominant influence on this movie...
...Who was her first lover...
...The Piano proceeds in the opposite direction: the psychologically and socially withdrawn heroine finally makes peace with common humanity through the liberation of sexual love...
...As I've noted, this director needs a writer...
...In order to measure her inner journey, we must know from where she is starting...
...Even that inner voice (and how clever of Campion to make it a child's...
...Generally, that silence is dramatic garnish, not substance...
...But, during subsequent visits, Ada barters crypto-sexual favors for clusters of keys...
...Campion gives nary a hint...
...Worse still is the lack of information about the relationship that produced the illegitimate daughter...
...She's a true poet by starts and fits...
...He gradually comes to love her (and to feel some affection for the little girl), but Ada doesn't respond...
...the evocation of the marshland locale in all its clamminess and squishiness...
...And, indeed, D.H...
...I suspect that Campion wrote her script by trying to link the various haunting images that came to her while dreaming or daydreaming...
...So far I have been complaining about the way Campion has set up the background of her story...
...No such incuriosity vitiated Ms...
...Was she in pursuit of sexual fulfillment or merely curious or desirous of a child or rebelling against her parents or was she raped...
...RICHARD ALLEVA 28...
...By the time our heroine rushes into Baines's arms, she seems guided more by the dictates of plot than by passion...
...she is voluntarily mute...
...That's a fine image to start from, but the actress doesn't alter it significantly as the sex duel proceeds...
...a mystical feeling of detachment...
...Because of Neill's pathos and Keitel's inexpressiveness, we tilt too far toward the husband...
...Obviously, Ada is going to catch fire so we have to be gripped by the process, not the outcome...
...To show convincingly how Ada's scornful bargaining gradually turns into real desire, Campion would have had to elicit from her actress the tiniest shifts of facial expression, a virtual ballet of eye contact between her and Baines, aborted smiles, unmaintainable frowns...
...An Angel at My Table shows how an eccentric, extremely shy person can find her niche in the world while continuing to hold conventional society at a distance...
...She doesn't explore them...
...The Piano, far from being a masterpiece, isn't even a good movie...
...When Ada ships off to New Zealand, she takes her daughter, her piano, and her silence with her...
...Which allows me to conclude on a hopeful note...
...But, as is, the heroine's silence comes across only as an overstatement of her detachment...
...But this tells us more about the husband than about Ada...
...The Piano is Campion's own original script and, writing on her own, she doesn't probe...
...In the final scenes, Neill does succeed in making Stewart's torment moving, but this very success creates an imbalance since we are meant to sympathize with both men equally...
...There are three peculiar things about Ada: she has an illegitimate daughter...
...No puzzlement on her part, not even curiosity...
...Furthermore, the superficiality of Campion the writer elicits a corresponding carelessness in Campion the greatly gifted director...
...As Baines, Harvey Keitel is supposed to be a blend of sensitivity and brutishness...
...aversion to her family...
...This is what I meant when I complained of The Piano's basic lack of curiosity...
...We never find out...
...Did Ada choose silence at an early age because of traumatic experience...
...Sam Neill, superb as the coldblooded lead in the Brit TV series "Reilly, Ace of Spies," and even better as Meryl Streep's warmhearted husband in A Cry in the Dark, plays the husband...
...It suffers from something that is lethal to dramatists and film directors: a basic lack of curiosity about what makes human beings tick...
...What a wonderful counterpoint might have been achieved by having this voice express Ada's still childish, impish self while Holly Hunter's face and figure present the heroine's dour adult exterior...
...But the heroine of Angel's, factually based story, Janet Frame, was an accomplished writer who provided the director with an insightful autobiography which the director and her co-scenarist, Laura Jones, ably adapted...
...It certainly displays all the makings of such: an intriguing story, gifted actors in the leads, handsome photography, clever narrative devices, intimations of the depths of human nature...
...In New Zealand, Ada falls into an uneasy and nonsexual domesticity with her husband, Stewart, a starchy but not entirely unlikable man...
...But what does she supply instead...
...What about the foreground, the ongoing action...
...They agree that the number of visits she pays to his house (ostensibly to teach him to play) will match the number of black keys on the instrument...
...This isn't fruitful ambiguity but dramatic blankness...
...Let the reader who has already seen the movie think back: which scene would have been essentially altered by having Ada speak aloud rather than through sign language and scribbled notes...
...offhandedly piercing moments such as the one when Neill, spying through a window at the lovemaking of the adulterous couple, is suddenly jolted when his dog trots to his side and licks his hand...
...Campion has misfired with her male actors, too...
...By this the director warns us that she isn't going to fall back on glib psychiatric or sociological explanations...
...Jane Campion's next movie is her adaptation of The Portrait of a Lady...
...Bravo...
...Who could ask for anything more...
...Instead, Campion has turned the usually irrepressible Holly Hunter into something monochromatically dour, even forbidding—a white mask of ungracious chastity...
...He gets only the brutishness right...
...A clever dramatic device but how does Campion develop 27 SCREEN it...
...She accepts a bargain from the purchaser, an illiterate roughneck named Baines, whose attraction to Ada becomes an obsession...
...All this and most of the top prizes at the Cannes Film Festival...
...Nothing...
...What do we learn about Ada's inner life from her oddities...
...Campion here coasts on the oddity of her situations...
...And certain other elements in this movie are undeniably well done: the natural way the Maori natives drift along the periphery of the action, enriching the atmosphere and the film's sense of history without dissipating the central situation...
...Campion's previous film, An Angel at My Table, which was very good indeed...
...Baines asks that she raise her skirt while she plays and that costs him five keys, the removal of her outer garments costs ten, and so forth...
...and, though her relationship with her daughter is affectionate enough, she makes essential contact only with her piano, on which she plays anachronistically dreamy, Keith Jarrett-style music...
...That heroine, Ada, is a middle-class Scotswoman of about thirty who comes to nineteenth-century New Zealand as a mailorder bride...
Vol. 121 • January 1994 • No. 1
