I wouldn't recommend this to anyone under 105 years of age with a good sense of sight and hearing.

Rating: 1/10 (26 April 1999)

I feel like a certain famous comedian when I say, "...take the setting, characters, and plot...PLEASE!!
The setting takes place in one of the more beautiful spots in the world - New Zealand, but who could see it through all the backwoods trees, rain, and thick, yucky knee-deep mud they tromped around in throughout the movie.
The characters were developed before we even sat down so we were left in the dark as to who they really were and why. We didn't see an evolvement of any of them. They seemed disjointed in personality and very anemic.
For example, we see Stewart (Sam Neill), carefully taking a comb to his hair prior to meeting, for the first time, his new bride. This shows an element of care and tenderness to please her. Just because of his very practical decision to leave the piano behind on the beach because it was too much for his men to carry doesn't make him a bully. Her obsession with a piano was not something he fully understood just then. Then, as the story progresses, he turns into a "Peeping Tom" and a few scenes later, performs a very shocking and brutal act that was very unbecoming of what we knew him to be at first.
Ada (Holly Hunter) is a rigid, cold-hearted, selfish, unbecoming bride who only knows how to stomp her feet when she doesn't get her way and sell her body for her real true love, the piano. And how did she become mute? She never could say.
As for the third member of the bizarre triangle, Baines (Harvey Keitel), neighbor to the newly-weds, and a native tribesman would-be-but-not-quite, is an uncouth, ego-centric male who encourages Ada to prostitute herself out to him in return for her piano, key by key, of course. But she holds her ground by indicating silently, "only the black keys". ...What a bargain! A few scenes later we see him asking her to leave when she comes of her own volition because he only wants her to be with him if she truly cares. Since when did he become so concerned for her feelings??
I couldn't decide whether the scene depicting his school-boy interest in the hole in her black stocking that bore a dime-size portion of her stark-white bare leg was more comical or just plain ridiculous.
Flora (Ann Paquin), seemed to take after her mother's disgraceful behavior with her bratty, selfish manifestations. Seeing far more through the cracks in Baine's hut than she should have, this little girl didn't have much of a role model in her mother.
The plot...anything said here may give too much away...that's how little there was to it.
The only real depth to this movie was in the ocean, as the most colorful character in the story, the Piano, took it's final plunge (in what seemed more like a suicide after all it had been through) to it's watery grave where it could finally have some peace. ...Now where are those rotten tomatoes?