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‘Lantana’ Is A Tangled Mess

Ray Lawrence’s “Lantana” has the vibe and appearance of an excellent character drama, but sadly has little else, for once all of its pieces are primed and ready to go, it doesn’t know what to do with itself. That’s a shame, for the final result ends up ruining one of the best-adapted screenplays of 2001.

“Lantana” begins with a real eye-opener: a slow tracking shot in the middle of a jungle-like patch of lantana vines gradually reveals the dead body of a woman, her limbs and head twisted in a grotesque fashion to suggest that it can’t possibly be an accident. We learn the identity of the woman later, and her death is a focal point in the film, although not at all the central element of the story. Perhaps if Lawrence had drawn out the film into more of a murder mystery instead of a pretentious character drama, we would have a winner on our hands.

But “Lantana” starts slow, builds momentum, and then swan dives once more, committing two cardinal sins of character drama. First off, the film lacks a protagonist; the audience doesn’t really care for or sympathize with any of the central characters. What was supposed to be a drama about four stormy marriages comes off as a wet blanket presentation of eight pathetic people who are unhappy in their respective unions.

There’s Leon Zat (Anthony LaPaglia), the classic hardboiled cop with just a few too many demons. He willingly cheats on his wife, Sonja (Kerry Armstrong), with the voluptuous Jane O’May (Rachael Blake), who herself is trying to resolve things with her estranged husband, Pete (Glenn Robbins). Sonja Zat, suspecting her husband from the very beginning, finds solace in Dr. Valerie Somers (Barbara Hershey), who herself has never gotten over the murder of her young daughter, and is distant from her own husband, John Knox (Geoffrey Rush). Rounding out the eight are Nik and Paula Daniels (Vince Colosimo and Daniella Farinacci), who serve no apparent purpose except to interact with the other six and be additional agita. Got all that?

Andrew Bovell fashioned a fine script for this film, with some of the best original dialogue in recent years, but Lawrence doesn’t know how to bring his good scenes together in a fashion that keeps the pace and allows for sufficient character development. Here is the film’s second problem: it would like to think that it is deliberately paced and that it accomplishes that most pretentious of film depictions, the “slow burn.” “Lantana” doesn’t even manage to generate a burn, as any emotional fires that the film creates are quickly extinguished by painfully dry follow-up. As one of my colleagues commented during the movie, watching this film is often like watching smoldering ash.

The film’s central performances are top-notch, with Anthony LaPaglia in the best performance of his career and Barbara Hershey and Geoffrey Rush offering solid supporting turns. Also, the script must have looked like a cinematic gold mine on paper. But without a competent sense of flow or careful attention to detail, “Lantana” would better serve as a scene-by-scene workshop on good dialogue, not the film it tries to be.

I was told that a lantana is a fast growing entanglement of a plant that was once deposited in Australia by accident and has since overrun many agricultural epicenters of the country’s coastline. The title of the film is obviously meant to suggest an entangled, dramatic web spun by its characters, but is better applied to the production work on the film itself: a shapeless, irritating mess. C+

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