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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By expanding the confines of Carver's tale, Lawrence risks diluting its elemental power. While it makes a kind of ideological sense to cast the men's actions in racial terms, it makes less dramatic sense. The horror of the incident is overlaid with political indignation that feels tacked on.

In some ways, Lawrence is also contorting the story's elemental power by emphasizing its male-female polarities. His implicit premise is that the men did what they did because they were men. The fact that the woman was Aboriginal is less important than the fact that she was already dead and they didn't want to immediately curtail their bonding expedition.

Would their wives and girlfriends have behaved in diametrically opposite ways from the men? Lawrence seems to think so, but who knows? By typing male and female behavior so starkly, he risks perpetuating a different kind of cliché. He's loaded the deck by positioning the men as macho adventurers, and the woman as outraged caregivers.

And yet such is the inherent power of the Carver material that "Jindabyne" rises above its polemics. Lawrence may be accused of overreaching, but given his history of artistic ambition, it's difficult to imagine him framing this material as simply a fishing trip gone bad. Still, if he was a deeper artist, he might have found a way to achieve his ambitions without resorting to obviousness. Hemingway could do this sort of thing, and, in his own way, Carver could, too – their resonant simplicity contained multitudes. "Jindabyne" operates on a starker, less nuanced level, but it still confronts the audience with a question that lingers long after the lights come up: What would you have done? Grade: B

• Rated R for disturbing images, language, and some nudity.

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