TILL HUMAN VOICES WAKE US
# stars based on 4 stars: 2.5 Reviewed by: Harvey Karten Paramount Classics Directed by: Michael Petroni Written by: Michael Petroni Cast: Guy Pearce, Helena Bonham-Carter, Frank Gallagher, Brooke Harman, Lindley Joyner, Peter Curtin, Screened at: Review 1, NYC, 1/29/03
Thomas Wolfe said you can't go home again, but some people insist that have done so at least metaphorically. Now Michael Petroni, who wrote "Till Human Voices Wake Us," uses a segment of another great writer's poetry to explore the theme. The result is a valiant try, evoking the sort of lyricism and thematic thrust we beheld with other Australian films such as Peter Weir's 1975 gem "Picnic at Hanging Rock," a moody, atmospheric film set in 1900 about three school-girls and their teacher who mysteriously disappear on an outing. Unlike Weir's work, however, there is no suspense in "Till Human Voices" and the principal character, a psychiatrist played by Guy Pearce with such emotional repression--a hop, skip and jump away from the malady suffered by Ralph Fiennes as David Cronenberg's eponymous "Spider" that the human drama ends up as just so much preciosity.
Michael Petroni depends heavily on water as a symbol of spiritual drowning and bathes the screen in the timeless beauty of rural Australia's village of Castlemaine, Victoria. But despite an oft-intriguing supernatural motif, the film can have its audience writhing in their seats as though watching a painting by Henri Rousseau at the Met for an hour and a half.
The central focus is Sam Frank (Guy Pearce), a psychiatrist who is so repressed that he gives credence to the idea that only neurotics go into the field. Why else would one be enticed? In a series of seamless flashbacks, he is shown armored against life's enjoyments by the coldness of his surgeon father (Peter Curtin) but more importantly by personal guilt for a tragic event that took place when he was fifteen. When the first love of young Sam (Lindley Joyner) for the fourteen-year-old handicapped Silvy (Brooke Harman) is dashed by a drowning for which he feels largely responsible, he is doomed to relive the event in his mind to such an extent that twenty years later, when he rescues the enigmatic Ruby (Helena Bonham Carter) from the waters in the Australian town of Genoa, he is almost convinced that this amnesiac woman is the lost Silvy whose body was never found.
The more involving part of the film deals with young love and Brooke Harman and Lindley Joyner acting nicely in roles that might make you relive your own sixteenth summer with that first kiss that remains indelibly in your mind.
The title comes from T.S. Eliot's poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrok," a favorite of the young, crippled woman. If you believe that bucolic scenery and fine acting can make up for a dearth of narrative momentum, you'd probably not go wrong with this one. If your taste for preciosity is as limited as mine, however, consider this a yawner, albeit a refreshing change of pace from the glib, commercial output churned out during Hollywood's first two months of the year.
Rated R. 97 minutes. Copyright 2003 by Harvey Karten at Harveycritic@cs.com
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