A good movie that received much more praise than it deserved

Rating: 7/10 (5 December 2013)

Shine is a very famous movie here in South Australia because it was made by one of our own about one of our own. If it wasn't that this movie made a big impact in the States, earning it some academy awards, it would have sunk into obscurity. As it did go well in America, we begin to raise it to a level that it cannot really hold. Shine is a good movie, I agree with that, and yes it does deserve Academy awards, especially for the actor who played the adult David Helfgott, but I feel that us South Australians have made too much out of this movie.
Shine is about David Helfgott, a child prodigy with the piano. He was taught by his father and blitzed the competitions when he was young. He was thus offered tuitions and even given the chance to train in America. Unfortunately his father would not let him. Later he is given a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Music in London, and he goes against his father's wishes and travels to London to learn. His desire to please his father leads him to perform one of the hardest pieces ever written and he ends up having a nervous breakdown which leaves him scarred for the rest of his life.
The movie is about his life, but it seems that Hicks wanted to place an importance on David's relationship with his father. This should be the central point of the story. He plays the piece that his father wanted him to play and almost killed himself in the process; the movie finishes with his father's death, yet in the later part of the movie his father, and the relationship with him seems to take a back seat. There is only so much that one can do when one is creating a biography though, yet we can see that his father did have an enormous impact on his life.
I call David Helfgott's father Mr Insecurity because that is what he seems to be in the movie. His major goal is the preservation of his family yet the harder he tries to stick it together the further he pushes it apart. When he sees the children beginning to fight over a letter from David's host parents to be in America, he decides that he does not want David to go. This is not the beginning as you can see his displeasure from father go further back. He dislikes the upper class company that David will no doubt start keeping and fears that he will reject his father, who is from the poorer side of society. His father knows his status and is scared that he will loose his son, but he manifests his fears when David demands to go to London, and his father lashes out and disowns his child. Thus instead of keeping the family together, he tears it apart even further.
Shine, I think, is an average movie. It does deal with real people going through real things, and Scott Hicks definitely has a talent in creating movies, but I do not think that this movie is really worth all of the praise that people gave it. The only reason it is praised because it is a movie filmed in South Australia that made it to Hollywood.