Little Fish

Director Rowan Woods and his collaborators have crafted a totally absorbing urban drama about complex homosapiens whose lives have been compromised by drugs and various addictions.

Cate Blanchett is Tracy, the film's lynch-pin, a Western suburbs girl whose ambitions to get ahead are thwarted by financial and personal skeletons from her past.

Scribe Jacqueline Perske manipulates a tangled web of characters ranging from Sam Neil's retiring drug baron Brad to Hugo Weaving's failed yuppie junkie Lionel. Noni Hazlehurst, in a riveting performance, plays family matriarch Janelle, a woman so crippled by regret and betrayal, she can hardly stand upright.

The tone is a few degrees lighter than Woods' brilliant "The Boys" and the Cabramatta milieu is broader, but this is still a beautifully balanced character piece with top notch performances and a restrained third act that avoids the usual clichés.

Supporting turns by Susie Porter (as Jenny) and Joel Tobeck (as Moss) are exceptional.

Though some climactic clarity might have been helpful, this is, nevertheless, emotionally graphic and pictorially intense cinema.

The subject didn't sound very appealing to me but Cate Blanchett's in it and a whole cast of Aussie/NZ celebrities. Worth a peek, I thought, but sadly, it's disappointing. Cate Blanchett is Tracy, a former heroin addict trying to set up her own business and stay (emotionally) clear from a bunch of ne'er-do wells surrounding her. It's all misery in this film. For me it only works if the story is connected to a certain time and place. There's contemporary Sydney, but it merely serves as background music, it could have been anywhere anytime. It just doesn't come off as very authentic.

Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, Dustin Nguyen, Sam Neill, everyone acts their head off, but to no avail. There's little in the way of a story or direction to guide them. Blanchett is probably the most respected actress of her generation, and again she is very good. It's all her show. As a moodpiece it succeeds in a way, as drama is less rewarding. Director Rowan Woods tries hard to make this engaging but the characters, including Blanchett's, are mildly interesting at first, simply off-putting later. There's just too little to keep things afloat till the end, literally. It's all downhill and we have to slide with them.

Camera Obscura --- 5/10

Rowan Woods' previous film, "The Boys" (1997) had a certain detachment as he examined the psychology of the perpetrators of a particularly nasty crime - watching it was like looking at bugs through a microscope, though it did feature a truly brilliant performance by David Wenham. In this film from a script by Jacqueline Perske he takes a warmer and certainly a lighter look at some rather unprepossessing people living in the south-western suburbs of Sydney - specifically Cabramatta.

Tracey is a former heroin addict, clean for the last four years but with a less than perfect credit record, who is trying to buy a share in the video shop she is working in so she can expand into the internet gaming business (hey, isn't that illegal in Australia?). Her friend Lionel, a former football star and ex-boyfriend of her mother's is still an addict. As she tries unsuccessfully to raise money from some almost comically reluctant financiers she become involved in looking after Lionel, who seems to have a rather close relationship with Jockey, a local hoodlum and drug dealer and his sidekick Steve. Her Vietnamese-Australian ex-boyfriend Johnny suddenly arrives on the scene after four years away and is soon involved in a drug deal with her one-legged (and rather stupid) brother Ray. The "Little Fish" of the title turn out to be those little plastic fish than come with soy sauce inside them in East Asian restaurants, recycled to contain amphetamines, but it could equally describe most of the characters.

It's all very complicated and to be honest the plot is a bit of a monkey puzzle – I have the feeling there might be a few holes in it - but the film is really about the struggle to climb out of the mire. Some make it, others don't; often those who succeed owe their success to chance, others who fail do so despite every effort. Cate Blanchett as Tracey is as good as she has ever been. You may think she is a little genteel for the role, but blot out your memories of "Elizabeth" and she is just fine. Hugo Weaving as Lionel gives a pretty well definitive portrait of a burnt-out heroin addict. Sam Neil as the ruthless Jockey is a little less suave than usual, though his clothes are tailor made and his car a Jaguar. Noni Hazelhurst is all heart as mother (Heart is her surname) and Dustin Nguyen as Johnny, despite the dodgy accent, gets away with playing a person about 10 years younger than he actually is. Martin Henderson is a wonderful dumb Ray.

Perhaps the most impressive feature of the film is the up-close and personal photography (just about every scene looks like it was done with a hand-held camera) combined with some very imaginative fade-in and fade-out. The result is so atmospheric I almost felt the rain and smelled Hugo's lack of aftershave. More to the point, I felt the characters' moods. It was almost like being inside the movie. I very much liked the other recent Oz movie "Look Both Ways" which I saw two weeks ago. It also featured some innovative techniques, but this is a far more sophisticated piece of work.

This is an interesting movie, well worth seeing, even though it has substantial failings. Evenness of pace is probably its most debilitating aspect: the slow, steady plod to the climax prevents that climax from being quite as climactic as it should be. Also, the director and his DOP are too in love with the hand-held camera for their own good: too much of it really is irritating, and there is much too much of it in this film. Having said that, there are some wonderful shots and juxtaposition of shots, moving us from warm reds to cool blues and back again. As far as the plot is concerned, the characters are all too neatly slotted into it, emphasising the story's artificiality, which plays against naturalism of the acting, just as the snappy editing plays against the hand-held camera-work. .Compare and contrast THE USUAL SUSPECTS, which is so wonderfully artificial throughout that its story's twists, turns and games, and the theatrical turns from most of its cast add up to something very entertaining. LITTLE FISH, in the end, perhaps takes itself a little too seriously.

That's the carping out of the way. The good news is that the acting is terrific. Blanchett is a rare leading actress, capable of convincing us she's an ordinary working girl - one simply can't imagine, for example, Kidman taking this role on and making it so real and touching. Sam Neill, cast against type, is wonderfully loathsome. Martin Henderson, Dustin Nguyen, Joel Tobeck - all give top-class support. But the revelation is Hugo Weaving, who is magnificent as the drug-addicted former star-sportsman. Can this be the same actor who has been marking his time in THE MATRIX and LORD OF THE RINGS? Amazingly, it is. A totally convincing transformation. All in all, an only just better-than-average thriller, greatly enhanced by its actors.

Writer Jacqueline Perske and Director Rowan Woods chalk up another successful Australian film in LITTLE FISH, an intense, very personal drama about how illegal drugs affect communities, families and individuals. The story begs patience from the viewer as it is gratefully one that does not spell everything out for the viewer, but instead introduces the characters slowly and with hints of backgrounds that bring them to the moments of crisis the time-frame of the film uses.

Taking place in the Little Saigon area of Sydney, Tracy Heart (Cate Blanchett) is a recovered junkie who lives with her mother Janelle (Noni Hazlehurst) and partial amputee brother Ray (Martin Henderson), each trying to make ends meet in a life previously destroyed by drug addiction. Tracy has been clean for four years, works in a video store but has dreams of owning her own business, dreams that are thwarted by banks refusing to give her business loans solely on the basis of her previous addiction. Ray, his amputated leg the result of a car accident somehow connected with drugs, still sells heroin in 'little fish' containers, occasionally calling upon Tracy to make pickups and deliveries. The now absent stepfather Lionel (Hugo Weaving) fights his own addiction both to drugs and to his dealer Brad (Sam Neill) with whom he has been in a gay relationship since his divorce from Janelle. Tracy tries to support Lionel's attempts to kick his habit, but the attempts are failures. Everything comes to a head when 1) Tracy is desperate without her needed bank loan, 2) Tracy's Vietnamese ex-lover Jonny (Dustin Nguyen) returns from Vancouver where his family sent him to avoid the persecution of rehab in Sydney, 3) Brad retires leaving Lionel without a source of drugs or love and Lionel is replaced by a quasi-normal Steven (Joel Tobeck) who kicks the last part of the film into a spin. There are no solutions to anyone's problems: things just happen and the characters respond in the best way they can with the ominous cloud of drug addiction shading their lives and futures.

The script is terse and smart and the direction is relentlessly realistic and well paced. Cate Blanchett gives a sterling portrayal of the very complex Tracy, and Hugo Weaving, Noni Hazelhurst, Sam Neill, Dustin Nguyen, and Martin Henderson are superb. This is a tough little film that does not fear to examine the truth about the effect of drugs on people's lives and spirits. It is a very fine film. Recommended. Grady Harp