THE GAMES PEOPLE PLAY






By David Ansen
Newsweek (Atlantic Edition)
Vol. 131 Issue 6, p50, 1p
February 9, 1998



Gamblers and lovers




When a movie comes along as handsome, literate and ambitious as Gillian Armstrong's Oscar and Lucinda, it should be a cause for rejoicing. This picaresque tale of Victorian Australia and England, adapted by Laura Jones from Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel, is made with passion, skill and a commendable disdain for the predictable. It has a lovely score by Thomas Newman, stunning production design, striking costumes and gorgeous cinematography. Unfortunately, it just doesn't jell.

"Oscar and Lucinda" is a classic example of a highly literary novel whose virtues stubbornly resist translation to the screen. It's the tale of two singular misfits whose fates collide because of a shared passion for gambling. Oscar (Ralph Fiennes) is a naive, guilt-stricken man who breaks with his fundamentalist father and goes to Oxford to become an Anglican priest. There he discovers the giddy glories of racetrack gambling. Realizing that his addiction stands in the way of his vocation, he decides (with the flip of a coin) to sail to Australia to become a missionary. On the voyage he meets the obsessive gambler Lucinda (Cate Blancbett), a wealthy, independent Australian heiress who's bought a glass factory in Sydney. These two may seem meant for each other, but the unworldly and self-punishing Oscar is convinced she loves another man. To win her, he engages her in a wager: that he can build and transport a glass church to a remote town in New South Wales where the minister he thinks she loves resides.

By the time "Oscar and Lucinda" arrives at its highly symbolic conclusion, the movie has become tangled in its own intricate cosmology, caught in a narrative gridlock of eccentric details. Oscar and Lucinda's rarefied compulsions seem willed by literary fiat, not flesh and blood. Having no entree to their inner lives, we have to be constantly told by the narrator (Oscar's great-grandson) what they are feeling. Fiennes, made up to resemble an ascetic Harpo Marx, gives an arch, theatrical performance so stylized it's hard to understand Lucinda's attraction to him. It's easier to see Lucinda's allure--Blanchett is a fiery delight. Since there's no emotional glue holding Carey's flights of fancy together, what should seem magically unpredictable too often feels merely whimsical. A noble failure, "Oscar and Lucinda" wins your respect, but not your heart.

 

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