'Till Human Voices Wake Us': It's the actor

By Manohla Dargis
Los Angeles Times

In the throes of emotional oblivion, Franks is a conceit in search of a personality. He doesn't recall his dreams, forgets to cry at his father's funeral and barely remembers to crack a smile, even when a beautiful stranger cruises him on a train. It's on his way to the Australian Outback to bury his father that the doctor first meets Ruby (Helena Bonham Carter). She retrieves his dropped book (`you've lost your place," she tells him), tenders an inviting smile, only to abruptly disappear. Soon afterward, in a coincidence that tips writer-director Michael Petroni's narrative hand, Franks is fishing Ruby out of a local river. As he tries to determine if she's a victim of an accident or a perpetrator, Ruby — now suffering from amnesia — tries to remember where she came from and why.

Petroni, who wrote last year's "The Secret Lives of Altar Boys," has a weakness for the overdetermined moment. The doctor isn't just buttoned-down; he's a head case. After his father dies, Franks is flooded by scenes from his adolescence when he was 15 (played by Lindley Joyner) and in love with Silvy (Brooke Harman), a local girl with a fondness for T.S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." In flashbacks that look as if they've been dipped in butterscotch, the adolescents leisurely meander through their lost innocence, interludes that work a loud and increasingly clanging counterpoint to scenes of the adults warily circling each other in the present. Memories and metaphors jostle against each other with such escalating force that by the time Franks sees Ruby slurping spoonfuls of preserved cherries at his kitchen table it's no surprise he's a goner — the very movie has gone off the rails.

And not a minute too soon. However preposterous, the abrupt turn into the metaphysical at least shakes things up. What transpires doesn't make a bit of sense but Pearce and Bonham Carter, whose motors runs fast, aren't the sort of performers that should remain in idle for long. (There's a scary underside to their beauty.) Kept in check by his character's neuroses, Pearce holds our attention throughout, but it isn't until near the end that he manages to break free of his character's and his director's inhibitions. In a brief monologue that echoes the love song of Prufrock, his murmur now transformed into a mellifluous lament, Pearce fashions a small epic of heartbreak. You may not believe the character for a second, but the actor keeps your faith like a promise.