possibility of lyrical release.
Eri Bana, Franka Potente and Kodi Smit-McPhee in portray a positively good character. Romulus, My Father, by the well-known moral philosopher Raimond Gaita, succeeds at this task for two reasons - because the man it describes was a real person, special pleading.
Romulus, played by Eric Bana in the film, was a blacksmith who near Castlemaine with his wife, Christina, and their young son Rai (in other words, Gaita himself). In the book, he appears as a gifted man of remarkable virtue - exemplary in his loyalty, charity, capacity for work and commitment to an austere moral code.
We know these things because Gaita tells us so, many times over.
hero, it's not because he acts decisively at some key moment. Rather, he's presented as a fatalist, who endures his often horrific circumstances more than he tries to change them.
In other words, virtue of the kind exemplified by Romulus is not a performance but a way of being, evident in the total conduct of a life.
In practice, however, it is Gaita who "performs" virtue at a certain remove: his writerly voice dominates the book, by turns meditative and matter-of-fact, scrupulous yet unshakable in its judgements.
In setting out to turn Gaita's book into a movie, it might seem that the actor-turned-director Richard Roxburgh and his co-writer, Nick Drake, have set themselves an impossible task. Unlike the characters in Gaita's book, the Romulus and Christina of the film are inescapably fictional, doubly distanced from their real-life counterparts.
At one point, Gaita quotes Oscar Wilde's remark that "it is only Romulus, with his rejection of display, could never have understood. But in cinema, appearances are all we have. On screen, much of its point.
incorporating a voice-over narration, or a "frame story" in which father and son look back on the past as adults. But in order to who can convince through his presence - in other words, an actor of Bana does not quite fit the bill. He's effective at defining the character's external, physical traits: the deep, steady, accented voice, the economical gestures, the elegant way with a cigarette.
But for all his technical gifts, there's something overly smooth and boyish about him: he lacks a certain kind of weight, and without this the film feels both subdued and unfocused.
As a director, Roxburgh relies too heavily on quiet moments that silently at the table, or emerge from the distance out of fields of wheat; the camera rarely moves, except in brief scenes of action. Often, the actors adopt fixed, emblematic postures, as if paralysed by events too terrible for any response.
If anything, the film seems to be about repression - a word and a concept only occasionally invoked by Gaita. As the unstable Christina, Franka Potente is hardly recognisable as the husband and neglect her children, this quality only emerges in scattered gestures that register as subtly grotesque. When the film, she switches on the jukebox, pulls him to her breast and insists that he dance with her: repelled, he pulls away.
There's baffled by the excessive, theatrical behaviour of his wife.
tell.
from a bewildered distance, Romulus My Father is also not a film world of sex and cruelty.
in the film. While Roxburgh is almost too loyal to Gaita, his images often suggest meanings remote from the book. Romulus is still a wise and loving father, but there's also a sense of something potentially monstrous lurking under his stillness.
In between the open fields and the sky, the farmhouse often seems like a dark prison: when a flock of diseased chickens are buried alive, Christina explicitly identifies with their plight.
The commentator Robert Manne, a friend of Gaita, said Father".
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