film
PETER CRAVEN REVIEWS THE
FILM OF OSCAR AND LUCINDA
Oscar and Lucinda
Directed by Gillian Armstrong
Screenplay by Laura Jones
With Ralph Fiennes, Cate Blanchett, Ciaran Hinds, Josephine Byrnes, Richard Roxburgh
OSCAR AND LUCINDA IS the next best thing we have to that gleaming oxymoron a contemporary Australian literary classic. It won a swag of prizes (not least the Booker); it is a long vibrant narrative including history full of the rustle of Victorian costumes but with a whisper of the horrors on which this country was founded with a brief ghastly moment representing the murder of Aborigines.
Peter Carey's 1988 novel is also the book a lot of people would turn to if they wanted to show how Australian writing could take it up to the Marquezes and Rushdies, the fabulist tradition where you get realism and fancy with the lot. Oscar and Lucinda has, after all, its glass church on water, its central conceits of gambling, its Plymouth Brethren and megalomaniac clerks and parish hypocrites and Chinese gaming dens, its random happenstance and its dea ex machina.
The story of how fey fragile Oscar Hopkins, the son of a fanatical but upright father first embraces Anglicanism then gambling and then, with fumbling mute pathos, Lucinda Leplastrier will live as one of the great Australian stories (if 'story' is the word). One of the peculiarities of Peter Carey's talent which this film does not succeed in disguising -- is that he is a writer with very formidable narrative gifts who is, at the same time, often incapable of sustaining (or unwilling to sustain) his own narrative logic. He is a magician of narrative momentum or line but then defeats expectation (often with the most cartoonish or comic strip effects) that can look like copouts.
Why does Mr Stratton, Oscar's clerical mentor, who has been a comic character for most of the book's action, commit suicide and why doesn't the novelist do more with this if he is going to introduce this discordant note? Why are there mad interludes like Oscar's incarnation as Mr Smudge, the worst of all clerks? Why does Jeffris, the clerk who leads the expedition, turn into a monster of sadism and why does the narrative darken so murkily under his influence? Why indeed does Oscar not simply get his Lucinda and why if there is to be complication and tragedy should this come through the skeletal and improbable offices of Mrs Chadwick?
There are, I think, answers to some of these questions and not to others. But whether you are an unambiguous admirer of Peter Carey or whether, like me, you think he's always in danger of biting off more than he can chew, that he's given to shifts of tone and focus that dissipate the coherence of his books, there is no doubt that Oscar and Lucinda generates enormous poignancy from the gap between what happens in the mutating whirligig of the book's action and how this has significance in the minds of the main characters. And, in this respect, Carey's magic and his realism are sufficiently contraindicated to make him radically undramatic in any structural sense, Aristotelian or otherwise.
This is almost the alpha and omega of what goes wrong with Gillian Armstrong's bright and beautiful looking film of Oscar and Lucinda. The two main characters are perfectly cast, the script is reverently transcriptive of the book's action and dialogue, both the Englishness and the Australianness of Oscar and Lucinda's ambience (its contrasted idioms and landscapes) are incarnated with tact and skill but neither Gillian Armstrong's direction nor Laura Jones' script can provide an equivalent to the écriture of Carey, the strange compelling quality of the aporia he creates, which is all in the gap between the comic buoyancy of the hope the narrative sets up and the crashing caricatured cataclysm which ensues so that Oscar with his goodness and oddness and ineffectuality seems like the objective correlative of a book that burns in the mind even as it sinks like a glass church.
Armstrong is a naturally extroverted director and she has no way into the haunted spaces behind Carey's farce. We never know as an audience the depth of Oscar's despair when the seastorm comes like the voice of God to condemn his vice nor -- quite crucially -- do we get the naive complexities of Oscar's love of Lucinda or Lucinda's love for Oscar.