Date: Fri 31-Jan-1997

Publication: Bee

Author: DONNAM

Illustration: C

Location: A8

Quick Words:

Playing-Shine-Rush

Full Text:

(rev "Shine" for Now Playing, 1/31/97)

Now Playing-

After Success At Golden Globes Could "Shine" Take Home Oscar?

By Trey Paul Alexander III

Shine is beginning to look like the little film that could. It opened on the

same day as some of Hollywood's holiday big guns - 101 Dalmatians , Star Trek:

First Contact and Jingle All the Way - and predictably failed to gather much

mainstream noise. But slightly over two months later, this Fine Line

production, currently playing at the Bethel Cinema, continues to plug along

and is gaining serious Oscar momentum, especially on the heels of actor

Geoffrey Rush's recent Golden Globe win for Best Dramatic Actor.

Rush stars as pianist David Helfgott, a former child prodigy whose expansive

talent can only be subdued by the colossal pressure to succeed applied by his

exacting father, Peter (Armin Mueller-Stahl). David is first seen as an adult,

wandering aimlessly and muttering almost incoherently about things that become

clear as the film begins to flash back to his childhood in Perth, Australia,

during the 1950s.

As a boy (Alex Rafalowicz) who shows an amazing gift for music, David wows

every audience for which he plays. His overprotective father, a Polish

survivor of the Holocaust, demands every fiber of his son's being be devoted

to his craft, yet paradoxically also refuses almost all outside assistance,

shunning offers from others who seek to help David nurture his gifts.

Particularly anathema is anyone whose proposal would take David away from

Australia - or, more specifically, would take David away from his family.

The struggle between father and son continues as David (now played by Noah

Taylor as a teen and young adult) constantly receives lucrative bids to study

music, but his father maintains his hardline stance. "I won't let anybody

destroy this family!" is Peter's war cry, equating David's desire to study

abroad as tantamount to betrayal. This portion of the film is perhaps its most

powerful, with Mueller-Stahl's portrayal so shaded it is difficult to easily

write off Peter for the mental (and physical) abuse he brandishes. Taylor, as

young David, gives subtle voice to all the demons waging at the core of his

tortured soul as he tries to tame an imposing, legendary composition

(Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No.3 ) and his father's crushing demands.

In fact, Taylor is so good that it creates a bit of a dilemma when one begins

to estimate the film's (and the performers') worth come awards time. Rush gets

the more flamboyant role of Helfgott as an adult, with all his eccentricities

- his mental imbalances, speech peculiarities, penchant for cavorting in water

- intact and securely in place. It is a quirky part, in the realm of Dustin

Hoffman's work in Rain Man or Tom Hanks' in Forrest Gump : the role is so "out

there" and full of tics it could have failed miserably had the actor (in this

case, Rush) relied only on histrionic gimmicks instead of his acute sense of

the role and complete immersion in its idiosyncrasies.

Rush passes this test, but I'm still hard pressed to acknowledge him as the

year's best dramatic lead actor. This is not a slight to his work, but more a

simple matter of screen time and story division. Taylor (by my unofficial

estimation) is in the movie slightly more than Rush and has the more difficult

task of filling in the nuance of the Helfgott role by giving the audience the

pianist's slow but steady decline into the recesses of himself and his music.

In other words, if the character arc of Helfgott could be summed up in a

journey from A to B to C, then Rush has to manage C, while Taylor's labor

encompasses all three points. Both actors are superb, but it could be argued

Rush's performance is greatly enhanced by Taylor's more modulated portrayal.

Shine is rated PG-13 for adult themes, profanity and brief flashes of nudity

(pertaining to another of Helfgott's peculiarities).