A murder exposes marital fault lines in 'Jindabyne'

In the Australian film starring Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney, a couple find themselves at odds when the husband discovers a dead body.

from the April 27, 2007 edition

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In "Jindabyne," four men go on a fishing trip close to the New South Wales town that gives the Australian film its name. There they discover a drowned young woman in the water. Instead of making the trek back to their truck, they finish out the excursion before returning home to report the incident. The outrage that greets the men from their wives, girlfriends, and their community is at first incomprehensible to them. They don't believe that they did anything wrong. After all, the woman was dead when they found her. There was nothing they could do to save her.

If this all sounds familiar, that's because it's based on "So Much Water So Close to Home," the same Raymond Carver short story that Robert Altman used for a portion of his "Short Cuts." Writer-director Ray Lawrence, well regarded for his two previous films, "Bliss" and "Lantana," expands Carver's work into an indictment of colonialism and an examination of the chasm that supposedly exists between men and women over matters of the heart.

Lawrence focuses on Stewart Kane (Gabriel Byrne), one of the men, and his wife, Claire (Laura Linney). Because she first hears the news about the fishing trip from others, Claire becomes unhinged by her husband's betrayal of their trust.

She becomes a one-woman crusade to goad the community into helping the dead woman's family. The campaign falls on deaf ears. Since the woman lived in a nearby Aboriginal community, the incident has racial overtones. Lawrence presents Claire as a white liberal do-gooder whose efforts, while well-meaning, are misguided (and not welcomed by the Aborigines).

The men's behavior is likewise presented in racial terms. The question becomes: Would they have behaved differently – more responsibly – if the drowned woman were white? Without being overtly explicit about it, Lawrence makes it clear where his sympathies lie. For him, this story is a metaphor for the depredations of colonialism. (We even get to see how the woman is murdered – by a crazed white local, of course.)

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