It was reassuring to see, here, a couple of negative reviews of Jindabyne: I was starting to think I was the only person in the world who found this film disappointing. Why disappointing? First and foremost, I had expected better from the makers of Lantana, which, while slightly overrated, was a fine film. I had expected that Ray Lawrence's next film would be better still, whereas in fact it is not in the same class. I realise that film reviews are largely subjective, and saying that it just didn't "work" for me is not saying a great deal. The best I can do is to explain why it didn't "work". I found the depiction of the film's central incident the men's reaction to the finding of the body, and their subsequent actions (or inactions) frankly unbelievable. To react with (it seemed to me) almost exaggerated horror, and then for the next couple of days to blithely ignore the fact that there was a dead body tethered to a log a short distance away, while they angled pleasantly in the same river, seemed something that people simply wouldn't do. I mean, if their initial reaction had been a lot more low-key, or if there had been some other aspect of their reaction which had made their subsequent heartless indifference to their obvious moral and legal duty more believable, then the whole scenario would have been more credible. For me, the film suffered a blow at that point from which it never recovered. The other main aspect of the film which I felt didn't work was the rather muddled attempt to establish a kind of spiritual undercurrent (if you'll excuse the pun) which ran through the film. It was, like, the drowned town, with its old folks (now, presumably, dead) sitting in their rocking chairs; likewise the old people interviewed in the video: all those dead people, down there, under the water; and the spirits of those dead people rising from their watery graves to come and threaten to drag people swimming in the lake down to the depths (how many times was that motif used!); and those same spirits humming through the wires to freak Billy out as he takes a leak down in the bush, and infecting the mind of the serial killer; and the unearthly, orphaned child with the weird name practising the black arts she learned (inherited?) from her dead (drowned?) mother; and the aboriginal smoke ceremony; and the invocation of St. Brigid; and and and
Mumbo-jumbo was the term that sprang to mind. Further criticism? I thought the serial killer was a quite gratuitous imposition on the film. In Lantana, the death which drove the action of the film was accidental. Why wasn't a similar device used here? Why a serial killer? Why that final scene?? The theme of the serial killer as a kind of malevolent force in nature was dealt with much better (and with a nicely gruesome humour) in Wolf Creek (another Australian film). What else? I found the characters on the whole a highly unsympathetic bunch, which for me made it difficult to get emotionally involved with their lives and issues. A better actor than Laura Linney might have carried off more successfully the attempt to portray the guilt associated with her realisation of her family's part in the tragedy, and also with her decision to kill her own (unborn) child, and her resulting clumsy attempts to "make things right". I think a good film could have been made using this subject matter, but only by going about it very differently.
