MOVIE SCENE
'Lantana' is an exploration of human interaction
By Marshall Fine
The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News
The lantana is an Australian shrub that grows into mammoth, woody thickets with maze-like branches that intertwine in unexpected ways. "Lantana," Ray Lawrence's terrific romantic drama, is about the human equivalent: three intertwined Australian couples who get lost in their own relationships and have trouble finding their way back to each other through the twists and turns of their daily lives.
The most prominent of these people is Leon Zat (Anthony LaPaglia), a Sydney police detective who is first glimpsed in flagrante with a woman we soon realize is not his wife. The woman, Jane (Rachael Blake), is recently separated from her husband and met Leon and his wife Sonja (Kerry Armstrong) in the ballroom dancing class they all attend.
Sonja, it turns out, suspects that Leon is seeing someone else. As she tells her psychiatrist, Dr. Valerie Somers (Barbara Hershey), "It feels like we're going through the motions. I want more than that."
Dr. Somers, however, has problems of her own. She still suffers grief over the murder of her daughter, which she has tried to channel into a best-selling book about the subject. She also feels the distance of her husband, John Knox (Geoffrey Rush), who has become remote and unaffectionate since the murder. When one of her male patients tells her of his relationship with a married man, she jumps to the conclusion that it is John he is involved with.
When Dr. Somers disappears, Leon becomes the lead detective on what he assumes is a murder case. But as he pursues the investigation, the trail leads in unexpected directions, causing the various strands of all of these lives to intersect, creating knots of emotion: guilt, longing, regret.
Written by Andrew Bovell from his play, "Lantana" is less a murder mystery than an exploration of human interaction: romantic and marital, which are often not the same thing.
The most intriguing character is Leon; LaPaglia makes him a hard-boiled type who smokes too much, has chest pains when he jogs and rampages at his son when he catches him smoking pot in his bedroom at home. Talking to a guy in a bar, Leon complains that his wife is always asking what he's thinking: "Why do women always want to know that?" he wonders aloud. "There's knowing i and there's knowing."
After a collision with another jogger that leaves them both bloodied and the other jogger in tears, Leon marvels at the phenomenon of men crying. When asked if he ever feels like weeping, Leon is taken aback.
"Sure," he says, then adds matter-of-factly, "But you don't do it, do you?"
Thanks to an alternately muscular and vulnerable performance by LaPaglia and deftly shaded ones by Geoffrey Rush and Barbara Hershey, "Lantana" becomes an intriguing onion of a film, one with multiple layers which, when peeled away, reveal more unexpected substance to the story and the characters. It's an absorbing and moving look at masculinity, at marriage and at the fact that, as one character observes, "Sometimes love isn't enough."
