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LANTANA
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What glue binds a marriage when it is no longer the chase of sex nor the obsession of children?
What is the meaning of sex when the flesh is not infinitely firm, the body not infinitely responsive? When the fires of adolescence have been banked into the coals of parenthood, or smothered for lack of emotional oxygen? When we reach forty-five, evolution is done with us -- we have propagated or not, raised children or not, but in any case we are no longer likely contributors to the gene pool -- but we are not done with ourselves. How then to live a marriage?
Two years ago, 11-year-old Eleanor, daughter of American therapist Valerie (Barbara Hershey) and her Australian professor husband John (Geoffrey Rush, late of QUILLS), was murdered. Though Valerie has written a best-selling book about it, neither she nor John have recovered from their grief. So she sits, therapist as confessor, non-judgmentally hearing the tales of lonely woe brought her by her patients, wondering to herself if her husband is unfaithful. (“The hard thing isn’t to have an affair,” a character says bitterly, “the hard thing is not to.”)
Through the rather conventional staging device of therapist scenes the story circles outward, drawing us into the lives of sad distant Sonja (Kerry Armstrong), married to dour heavy detective Leon (Anthony LaPaglia), who has just had an affair that Sonja suspects but does not know. (“It’s not an affair!” he snaps post-coitally to his lover Jane (Rachael Blake), “it’s just a one-night-stand that went another night.”)
Gradually the story draws in Jane, her estranged husband Pete, Jane’s neighbors Nik and Paula, Leon’s partner Claudia, all of whom are linked one with the other (an excess of the Principle of Dramatic Economy). We come to know them and sympathize with them even as we, the omniscient audience, think we know it all.
What do you do when all you have is each other and, at the very heart of intimacy, there is a pain too great to bear, the pain of a child’s death, the pain of the unvoiced lie? Yet the tree still stands when its core is rotten or has died -- until it is struck by lightning, when one of our characters suddenly disappears.
At a stroke, we are expelled from our newly gained intimacy and are again outsiders. And the disappearance in turn breaks the characters’ trances. Each of them (including the vanished one) is now a suspect. Secrets that each had protected are now forced into the open. Cop Leon takes over from therapist Valerie as movie interrogator, discovering that his wife Sonja is Valerie’s patient, and pilfering her most recent session tape, which he plays in his car, in small chunks, as if afraid to hear everything.
Unrelentingly well-acted -- LaPaglia, Hershey, Rush, Armstrong, and Blake are all exquisitely nuanced -- LANTANA respects all of its focus characters, both their striving and their frailty. Each is complex, by turns strong and weak, good or bad, aggressor or victim. Smiles are rare, thoughtful eyes are frequent. Intimacy is held only by truth, some of our characters discover, and truth is merciless, extracting its toll in pain. In the end, after the sex, after the children, all we can have is each other. And if we cannot have each other’s bare souls, we have nothing.
This movie should be rated M for mature, it is so hard to imagine anyone under thirty-five finding it of interest. But for those of us out past evolution’s horizons, this is a must-see, the best movie in many years.