"Good God, man! You can't let him play Rachmaninov's Third! He'll be killed! KILLED, I tell you! No-one has ever ..." etc.

Rating: 6/10 (11 August 1999)

Tortured genius, domineering father, piano music, blah, blah, et cetera. "Shine" may be a good movie, but its best friends couldn't call it special.
The script isn't at all strong and Hicks tries to make up the deficit with creative presentation of one kind or another. David is obsessed - at any rate, the film is obsessed, it's not clear to what extent David is - with Rachmaninov's third piano concerto (implausibly referred to as the "Rach 3"), the first movement in particular. We never quite hear this movement. We hear in the background on an old gramophone (throbbing dotted notes in the bass entirely inaudible); its themes are woven into the film's score; and in the big climactic scene where David plays it in public for the first time, sound effects are distorted so that we hear almost everything EXCEPT Rachmaninov's music as it really is. And clearly a lot of work went into arranging the shots in that climactic scene. The result is a much more creatively presented "moment of truth" than is usual in this kind of film.
If the presentation isn't threadbare clichÃ©, though, much of the content is. "Shine" does all the standard scenes very well - moments of triumph here, moments of despair there - but lacks an overall story that might make some sense of them. (This is particularly odd given that Scott Hicks felt not at all concerned with sticking to the facts of Helfgott's life, or even getting it vaguely right.) In the end it feels like an exceptionally well made nothing very much. Watch it for the performances - those of Noah Taylor and Geoffrey Rush in particular.