Fred Schepisi (2011)

When, in 1973, Patrick White became the first Australian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy’s speech confirming the award made specific mention of White’s ninth novel, The Eye of the Storm – a book which, according to Wikipedia, is more than six hundred pages long.  It seems reasonable to infer, even if neither of these things proves, that The Eye of the Storm is a complex work.  Fred Schepisi and his screenwriter Judy Morris have adapted White’s novel into a film which runs a little short of two hours.  It’s absorbing to watch but this is partly because what’s on screen is tantalising – Schepisi and Morris hint at what underlies the family relationships that the story describes but don’t explore them thoroughly.

The three main characters are Elizabeth Hunter, a rich, elderly widow, and her two children – a son with whom she flirts even now, a daughter whom she despises.  The son is a celebrated stage actor – he is Sir Basil Hunter – but his career is in decline.  The daughter, Dorothy, also has a posh title:  she married a minor French aristocrat and is formally the Princesse de Lascabanes although she’s short of funds.  Basil is randy but impotent.  Dorothy’s sex life doesn’t get beyond furtive self-pleasuring.  Elizabeth now rarely emerges from bed but continues to live in style, in a grand house in the Sydney suburb of Centennial Park, attended by two nurses and a housekeeper.  When her son and daughter return to the family home, from London and Paris respectively, they assume their mother is at death’s door but Elizabeth takes her time crossing the threshold.  In the meantime, Basil and Dorothy have an anxious wait for confirmation of their financial inheritance and the viewer learns something of how they became the people they now are, and about their mother’s influence on them.  Elizabeth’s son and daughter talk about her going into care – there’s even a suggestion at one point that she might be euthanised.  But the iron-willed Elizabeth chooses where and when to die, and, in her presence, her children are always made to feel like children.

The title refers to a crucial event that took place some thirty or more years previously and which Schepisi describes in a series of flashbacks.  On holiday with Dorothy on an island off the Queensland coast, Elizabeth brazenly makes a play for her timid, repressed daughter’s male companion.  The helpless, infuriated Dorothy flies back to the mainland, leaving Elizabeth alone on the island as a cyclone blows in.  She manages to climb into an underground shelter and emerges once the storm has passed.  The holiday home has been demolished but Elizabeth, pretty well unscathed, walks through the debris and looks out to sea happily, as if her escape from death enables her life to start anew.   If you look up The Eye of the Storm on Amazon, the summary description of the novel indicates that Elizabeth’s experience on the island amounts to more than against-the-odds survival:

‘Elizabeth Hunter … has a mystical experience during a summer storm  … which transforms all her relationships: her existence becomes charged with a meaning which communicates itself to those around her.’

An Australian ABC network website ‘Why bother with Patrick White?’ confirms and expands on the Amazon summary:

‘… the most extraordinary thing of all is that it is Elizabeth, flawed, damaged and damaging, who is vouchsafed the vision of unity in that moment of clarity – the eye of the storm.  Elizabeth does indeed experience the eye of an actual cyclone while on holiday … but, in the midst of a hectic and frantic life, she also experiences an eye, a still moment of meaning.’

The film conveys nothing of this mystical aspect of Elizabeth’s existence, although the one person who seems to unsettle her is Mary DeSantis, the practising Catholic nurse, who loves Elizabeth but to whom the latter is determinedly cold.  Elizabeth is uncomfortable with Mary’s avowal that:

‘I’ve only wanted to serve others, through my profession—which is all I know how to do. Oh, and to love, of course […] but that is so vast it is difficult to imagine how to achieve it.’

For the most part, the Elizabeth Hunter of the film is not much more than an outrageously entertaining matriarch-from-hell – wittily nasty, usually with a smile on her face, to almost everyone, including Basil, on whom she supposedly dotes.  (When he asks why she’s never watched him act, Elizabeth replies:  ‘You know I never come to see you because if you weren’t any good it would break my heart’.)  That may have been Schepisi and Judy Morrison’s intention but this reduction of the themes implied in the quotations above, whether by accident or design, seriously limits the film.  Even allowing for the idea of Basil and Dorothy being stuck in the past, The Eye of the Storm lacks momentum, in terms of either plot or character development.

I liked the way that Schepisi used Paul Grabowsky’s score, which becomes more noticeable as the film progresses – as if a clear central theme is gradually emerging (although it isn’t really).  There are amusing visual details like the colour co-ordination of Elizabeth’s outfit and the chaise longue from which she greets her son:  the mauve tint of her wig goes perfectly with the cushions and causes Basil to ask her other nurse, the sparky, crafty Flora, ‘Who is the ancient lilac fairy masquerading as my mother?’  But it’s too obvious when Flora, as part of her (quickly successful) attempt to seduce Basil, goes to her employer’s wardrobe and chooses the same white dress that Elizabeth wore to entice Dorothy’s boyfriend on the day of the storm.  Schepisi repeats images of insects in food (a worm in an apple, a fly in a jar of preserves) which are immediately startling but hardly an imaginative representation of the family relationships.  Although the main action takes place on the cusp of the 1960s and 1970s, The Eye of the Storm sometimes suggests a more distant past – and this isn’t always because an old woman, whose thoughts are made more rambling by the morphine she’s taking, is at its centre.  For example, an early scene, in which Basil talks with theatrical friends in England, presents an antiquated description of thespian mannerisms and bitchiness.  Basil’s voiceover narrates the story only occasionally and the references to his converting the material of his life into material for the theatre are sketchy.  It wasn’t clear to me whether Basil had already written for the stage or whether this was a new venture – a desperate attempt to revive his flagging theatrical fortunes.

What saves The Eye of the Storm ­is the quality of the acting – although your realisation of this also sharpens your awareness of what is missing from the film.  Charlotte Rampling is very enjoyable as Elizabeth, perhaps especially in her suggestions of the old woman’s lingering youthfulness:  when her aging housekeeper Lotte dresses up in Berlin 1930s cabaret costume and sings and dances at her bedside (you assume this a regular home entertainment), Elizabeth jiggles along to the rhythm of the music.  She sometimes speaks to Basil in tones that are almost girlish – at least compared with the snippy poise of the voice Elizabeth uses in conversation with Dorothy.  Geoffrey Rush is entirely convincing as Basil, even if you feel the role comes to him almost too easily.   John Gaden is excellent as Arnold Wyburd, Elizabeth’s faithful lawyer and, it transpires, erstwhile lover (one of many).   Robyn Nevin is equally effective as Wyburd’s wife Lal.  Perhaps because they both underplay so well, their one relatively less successful moment comes when the Wyburds have a big row about Arnold’s relationship with Elizabeth.  Both the nurses – Maria Theodorakis, as Mary, and Alexandra Schepisi (I assume the director’s daughter), as Flora – are good.  Lotte, the Jewish housekeeper and a concentration camp survivor, is a comparatively theatrical and familiar character.  Helen Morse plays her energetically but rather obviously.

The outstanding performance comes from Judy Davis, who makes Dorothy both horrifying and funny.  Her longing for sex and her alarm whenever it threatens are exquisitely realised.   Athol Shreve, a big-name Australian politician (played by Davis’s husband, Colin Friels), tries to seduce Dorothy:  she’s so embarrassed that, when Shreve mentions the word penis, she starts speaking in French, and is dismayed that he understands what she’s saying.  Davis expresses Dorothy’s tension in wonderful little details like knocking an invitation card against a wooden letter rack as she talks on the phone.  She’s especially brilliant in the episode in which Dorothy and Basil visit one of their late father’s country properties, now being rented to a farmer, Rory Macrory, and his family.   The good-looking, earthy Macrory (Peter Houghton) is soon giving Dorothy the eye.  Late one evening, when Macrory has had a few drinks, the pair find themselves alone together.  Judy Davis’s playing of this scene – Dorothy keeps trying to attract Macrory before instantly recoiling, then trying again – is superb.  Nothing happens of course.  But later on the same night, as Basil puts her to bed, Dorothy volunteers physical affection for the only time in the film.  She kisses her brother, chastely but on the lips.

14 September 2014