I had already thought of Harvey Keitel as our leading portrayer of depraved men with psychosexual hangups before I had even seen Jane Campion's fifth feature, Holy Smoke (1999). (The exclamation point seems to be used sometimes and not other times, though IMDB has it without, so that's what I'll go with. Excessive punctuation in titles usually bothers me, and in any case, the exclamation point doesn't appear on screen in the movie itself.)
The fact that the movie doesn't fully see him this way, despite ample evidence to the contrary, was just one of the problems I had with it. However, I did still like it overall.
Keitel re-teams with Campion after her third feature, The Piano, where he was also a highly sexualized though clearly more sympathetic character. He doesn't show his junk in this one, so Campion must have nixed his request.
It's her first (and so far only) collaboration with Kate Winslet, who does show her junk, if the female genitalia can be referred to as "junk." It's a naked performance in more ways than one, as Winslet portrays Ruth, an Australian in her early 20s who has come under the spell of a guru on an Indian ashram. That choice is an obvious example of her unstable mental state, but the cure by her family -- luring her back to Australia on the false pretense that her father is dying, then handing her over to a man (Keitel) who specializes in extracting people from cults -- is liable to cause even more confusion for the young woman.
Especially when the horndog played by Keitel, DJ Powers, proves quite incapable of keeping his junk in his pants, even if we never see it on screen.
It's probably obvious where things will go with the two of them when the are alone in a remote hut in the outback, within a reasonably close drive of her family if they need to check up on the progress. That's because DJ also has a tryst with Ruth's married (sister? I think? I wasn't sure about all the family connections) earlier in the story, and we already know he has a female partner who stayed back in the U.S. who is also his romantic partner.
However, I think we assume that DJ has never been unprofessional in situations like this before, with other confused young women who were in cults. This is where seeing the tail end of one of DJ's previous successes may have been helpful. It's an old screenwriting trick to show the skills of a central character in practice at the start of the film, to demonstrate both their talent for their job and what a successful outcome of these skills looks like. (Something, for example, Christopher Nolan's Inception does not do, to its detriment.) If we'd opened with DJ breaking the spell on another innocent young woman, we'd know that he typically earns both his paycheck and his reputation as one of the premier practitioners of this very specialized line of work.
Since this is really Ruth's story, though, the opening is devoted to images of her in India, involved in cult behavior that does not seem all too toxic, and perhaps, may actually be the quest for enlightenment she direly wants and needs. The movie interestingly refuses to condemn the guru, who we see only briefly, leaving us unable to determine whether or not he's a charlatan. The opening credits and the few minutes afterward actually make this whole thing look sort of joyous, as they replicate Ruth's perspective more than the perspective of her concerned friend who dobs Ruth in (to use the Australian lingo) to her family. In these scenes, Campion also dabbles with some visual effects to document the dizzy delirium of it all -- while stopping short of saying this can do Ruth no good. It's a good look on Campion and I'm sorry not to have seen her go back to that sort of thing more often in her career.
So we don't really get DJ until the movie is maybe 20 minutes old, at which point, we are going only on what he's showing us in the here and now. And at first it all looks very promising. He's using an approach that is more cooperative than confrontational, attempting to challenge Ruth's assumptions in unexpected ways that really seem like they have a chance of succeeding. We can see why he's successful at this, so in a way, this does fulfill the script function of showing us DJ at the height of his skills. Since we've never seen him close the deal, though, we have no idea if he falls apart at the end in other cases. (Presumably not, because that sort of thing would have gotten out.)
Since he does fall apart in this case -- it's not spoiling too much to tell you that -- we then don't really know what it is about Ruth that causes this reaction in him. It's very challenging, from a screenwriting perspective, to communicate to a viewer exactly why a particular close-quarters relationship results in something emotionally tumultuous. In his exceedingly frank way, DJ himself admits that his attraction to Ruth is sexual, an immediate inability to deny his physical urges, rather than intellectual or emotional. However, his initial loss of professional distance becomes less of a slip-up and more of a full-bore spiraling downward, at which point it's obvious that there's an intellectual and emotional connection he can't resist.
Problem is, this isn't really in Campion's dialogue. Ruth is manipulating DJ as much as DJ is attempting to (benignly, at least at first) manipulate her, as much as the guru (possibly benignly) manipulated her. She wants to destroy his defenses, mock and laugh at him, pretend she's interested only to pull the carpet out from under him -- all as a complicated form of payback for being placed in this situation to begin with, even if those feelings would more appropriately be directed at her family. However, Campion also want us to find her genuinely vulnerable and possibly in the midst of some sort of breakthrough -- though we can rarely distinguish this from her (justifiable) trickery.
The end result is that when things go big in the finale, it doesn't really feel earned. If DJ does this for a job, he should be up against these fragile emotional stakes all the time. And if this is the career he's chosen for himself, he himself should not be so vulnerable to the beauty and breasts (at one point he admits to having a particular thing for her breasts) of the women he is trying to help.
Even though it does get a bit confused, and seems to let DJ off the hook too much for behavior that is shamelessly exploitative, I was ultimately won over by Campion's filmmaking and her perspective. If you set aside the two main characters, the way the supporting characters act is quite reminiscent of the eccentricities we saw in her first film, Sweetie, and even on into her second film, An Angel at My Table, which is the first Campion film I watched for this series. There's a sort of wildness to these Australians that we might also see in a film like Mad Max -- a blue collar shagginess that is somewhere between punk and bogan. ("Bogan" being the Australian word for redneck.)
I want to call attention to two actors in particular, one I didn't know and one I did. The one I didn't know plays Ruth's mum, and her name is Julie Hamilton. She has a lot of traits that are really familiar to me from living in Australia, and I guess she did a lot of work before this, not so much after. She's the neurotic and panicky type, so her trip to India to try to convince Ruth to come home, where she's worried about being touched by everything, is both brave and comedic gold. Then there's Dan Wyllie, a character actor who shows up in Australian TV and movies all the time, but whose work I mostly know from the last ten years. It was good to see him show up here.
Okay, in September we get to my final Kathryn Bigelow movie for this series, Blue Steel.
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