A glittering turd.

Rating: 5/10 (17 January 2009)

This film--despite its Oscar winning performance and technical polish--is for the most part a load of steaming excrement that is morally and aesthetically bankrupt. Whether a film is straight fiction, biographical or a documentary it has to have a core of truth and authenticity. This film doesn't even attempt that: it's just cliché after cliché larded with cheap sentiment, over-simplification, and glaring inaccuracies, riddled with narrative gaps you could fly a plane through. At the end of the film I didn't feel like I knew the central character any better than I did at the beginning; indeed, no insights were given about the main characters current mental condition, or what led to his nervous breakdown. There was more psychological truth in Rocky III than this canard. It's a shame that David Helfgott's father got so tarnished in this depiction; the film's producers should have known better than to sully the reputation of a deceased man who cannot defend himself against the phony accusations presented here.
Biographies don't need to compromise the truth in order to be entertaining and win over audiences. Case in point: Jane Campion's superb film,"An Angel at My Table", another Aussie production about a mentally troubled artist--in this case, writer Dorothy Frame. It manages to be authentic, complex, revealing and yes, even inspirational, without glossing over or the uncomfortable truths of its difficult subject matter.