Wonderful Movie

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

An Aussie gem that contrasts heavily dark thematic undertones with the serenely quiet seeming landscape. For movie that has little to do with murder, and more to do with the emotionally strained relationships of the characters within, it is impressive that the filmmakers/screenwriter was able to capture this tension with the minimal use of dialogue.Action was character driven and thought provoking - brilliantly performed. The takes are long in most cases and I can see why some people find this movie slow, but the effect of these longer takes is that it enables a poetic tension to build and allows for performance to take over. In a cinematic world where we are used to rapid cutting, witty fast-paced dialogue and over-used movement shots, it is reassuring to see a film that is successful at achieving an engaging story through employing simplicity.

This films stirs up those nagging thoughts anchored in feelings about our place in the world. One single failure to do the right thing can be what defines who you are in the eyes of those who live in your community who have hardly shared a few informal greetings. Worse, those who know you best feel badly let down by a single act that really can't be understood by you or them. We all hope that it is an act of heroism that might be our legacy.This film has a casual greatness. It grinds out the message in an almost documentary style about the unwillingness of the protagonists to confront themselves and the resulting fallout on those around them. There is no Hollywood "closure" here for the victim's family. I may never watch this film again, so many scenes hit hard, or stir up those feelings that we are loath to acknowledge, but I urge you to watch it. It really does go places that few movies take you.A final word. I can't think of a more courageous actress than Laura Linney, who has taken that lonely road of tackling truly difficult parts in one project after another with gritty integrity and intelligence.

I have absolutely no idea how this ended up on my "want to see" list. I know nothing about the director, I don't particularly care about the actors, it has a rather low score on IMDb, and I don't remember hearing about it anywhere. About a third of the way through I had a flash of recognition as I realized that many years ago I'd read the Raymond Carver story it was based on (the same story also makes up a portion of SHORT CUTS, although I've forgotten it being in there at all).Lawrence expands on the story a bit, at least to my recollection. I don't remember there being any racial elements, which adds some interesting angles to the themes of guilt. The characters feel a wide array of guilts, and use them as weapons against each other, so introducing white guilt into the mix gives the film more avenues to explore. I found the drama rather compelling (after a somewhat sluggish first act) with its dilemmas and interpersonal conflict. I haven't read Carver for a long time, but I know he liked to examine the ways in which we justify our actions. However, the film does lay it on a bit thick at times, despite attempts at subtlety. Some of the metaphorical work going on is pretty heavy-handed. I also found the performances not terribly impressive. Still, a worthwhile endeavor for fans of moral tales.

Even in the best of all possible worlds, Jindabyne would have probably been a slow, quiet, unfocused and pretentious film. In this world, however, these filmmakers made an awesomely wrong-headed storytelling decision about half-way through. That inexplicably dumb choice invalidates everything that comes before it and turns everything that comes after in into an almost unendurable, torturous slog.Leading up to that stunningly stupid moment, this movie starts off like a horror movie with a guy in a truck pursuing a young girl in a small car. Then it breaks away from that to introduce us to a large cast of characters. Claire (the lovely Laura Linney) is an American woman living in Australia with her Irish husband Stewart (Gabriel Byrne). They have a young and emotionally delicate son named Tom (Sean Rees-Wemyss) and are one of those couples that sort of drift in and out of being connected to each other. They seem to have a conflict revolving around Stewart's mother infringing on what Claire feels is her familial territory. Claire and Stewart are friends with Carl and Jude (John Howard and Deborra-Lee Furness), an older couple raising their morbid granddaughter Caylin-Calandria (Maya Daniels) after their daughter died. Their conflict seems to be Jude's resentment that Caylin-Calandria survived while her mother died.After spending the first 20 minutes of so of the film acting as though it's going to be a coming-of-age story about the two kids surviving the turmoil of their parents and grandparents, all of that is abruptly thrown aside. Then Stewart, Carl and two other guys head deep into the Australia countryside to fish at a special river. It turns out that the guy in the truck from the beginning of the movie killed the girl and dumped her body in the river. The four fishermen find the girl's body, and here's where whatever might have been right about Jindabyne goes completely and irrevocably wrong. The four men decide to just leave the girl's body where it is and keep fishing for another day before finally notifying the police.The movie goes on after that and physically demonstrates Einstein's theories of the relativity of time, because the second half of this film takes an an eon to get through. There's a whole bit about the public revulsion at what Stewart and the other men did; the complicated marital history of Claire and Stewart; Claire goes on a quest to try and connect with the dead girl's family and atone for Stewart; the killer in the truck shows up a few times for no good reason except to keep the audience awake; we suddenly get a theme about the divide between white Australians and the Aborigines; and the story even comes back to Tom and Caylin-Calandria for a resolution to their little bit and it doesn't fit at all what they were doing in the first part of the film. And aside from Laura Linney doing some very fine acting, as usual, none of the stuff I just described is at all interesting or compelling or enlightening or entertaining. You can't care about any of that and you're left with either turning the movie off or suffering through to the end like a masochist.That's because these filmmakers botch the most important moment of this story and the most important scene in the film. That being the discussion Stewart and the others have about ignoring the dead girl and just fishing like nothing happened. The filmmakers botch it because that discussion never happens. It's not in the film. There's a scene where they find the body and then there's a scene where they're deciding what to do with the body while they're fishing, but we never get to see or hear the conversation about whether they should fish or go for the cops. It never happens.But the characters HAVE to have that conversation and the audience HAS to see them have that conversation. Not just because it's what every group of normal human beings would do, if only to verbally reassure themselves and each other that they aren't vile bastards for ignoring the dead girl, but because that's the moment when the audience is supposed to see who these guys really are, who they think they are and who they think each other is. That conversation is what is supposed to link and infuse everything that comes after it and make us remember and re-examine everything that came before that it. Without that conversation, there's this big, gaping wound in the story and it's all that you feel or focus on.I think the filmmakers did it that way because this film is really about the female characters. Claire and Jude are much more prominent and get far more lines and scenes than Stewart or Carl. In fact, almost all the female characters get more attention than their male counterparts. But the biggest and most powerful moment of the story happens to the 4 male characters. If the film correctly dealt with that moment, it would have to spend more time with those men and shove the female characters off to the side. These filmmakers didn't want to do that, but it is what the story demanded.This is another one of those films where you can really enjoy Laura Linney's performance. She gets a chance to shine the way she can as a woman who shouldn't be that likable on paper but is tremendously involving anyway. The rest of Jindabyne is either tedious or painful to sit through. It's frankly absurd how meaningful these filmmakers thought it would be, while they passed over the most meaningful aspect of the story. It's like the movie has a stroke in the middle of the story and doesn't realize its left side is paralyzed for the rest of the film.Unless you plan on fast forwarding through every scene that doesn't have Laura Linney in it…take a pass on Jindabyne.