Film
Hard Rain
by David Larsen
Vincent Ward’s new docu-drama isn’t easy, but it is memorable.
Vincent Ward’s new film is an angular, difficult thing, full of flaws and graces. I walked out of it wondering whether I’d just seen something important, or merely something that should have been. I also walked out wondering whether I’d enjoyed myself, which is, when you think about it, a pretty strange point to be unclear on.
The opening shot is of Ward himself, viewed through the windscreen of his car as he drives down a country road. His face, stationary relative to the camera, is overlaid with the windscreen’s backwards-racing reflections, so that as he begins to speak, he’s the only fixed point in a landscape that constantly recedes from him in two directions at once.
It’s a beautifully succinct expression of the problem with which Ward is about to grapple. Rain of the Children tells the story of Puhi Tatu, the Tuhoe woman who was the subject of his second film, In Spring One Plants Alone (1980). As Ward explains to us, he was happy with that film, which showed Puhi at the very end of her long life, living as a recluse, caring obsessively for her disturbed adult son, Niki. But over the next two-and-a-half decades, he became increasingly convinced he should try to trace the currents that had carried her to that point.
The new film stitches together historical re-enactments, live interviews with Puhi’s relatives and people who knew her, and footage of Puhi in her eighties. Rena Owen is among the actors who play the younger Puhi; Temuera Morrison is one of two actors playing Rua Kenana, the Tuhoe prophet who led his people into the Ureweras early last century to quarantine them at a time when Pakeha diseases were decimating Maori communities. Puhi explains much of her own story via scripted voice-overs that sound convincingly close to her actual voice. Ward fills in the gaps both through his own -voice-overs and by putting himself in front of the camera.
The choppy, piecemeal structure initially makes it difficult to get a purchase on the film, but it has the virtue of keeping us aware of exactly what we’re watching. As Puhi’s role in an under-chronicled episode of our history becomes clearer, we’re constantly reminded that Ward is gathering evidence, shaping the narrative to fit what he can glimpse of the past, guessing where he has to. Historical documentary, more than most forms, allows film-makers to slide their interpretive choices in under our radar. Ward’s insistence on his own mediating presence often seems a distancing distraction; but that forced acknowledgement of the gulf between us and Puhi amounts to honest viewing. The film allows us close enough to her, in the end, to gain some idea of who she was, and what she lived through. The reverberant sadness of her story is going to stay with me.
Computerised special effects have cheapened wonder, while licensing a generation of uninspired film-makers to trade on scale, giving us wide vistas full of homogeneous hordes and calling it entertainment. But without computers there would be no Pixar. I’ll take that trade.
The first 20 minutes of Wall-E are almost entirely silent, and it has far less dialogue throughout than any previous Pixar release. The reliance on purely visual narrative may challenge very young children, though the storytelling is so well done and so involving that I wouldn’t bank on that; for the rest of us, it’s something to celebrate. The little robot Wall-E’s lonely vigil on an abandoned, environmentally devastated Earth; his hopeless love for shiny droid-scout Eve; his accidental journey into deep space, where he discovers what’s happened to humanity … it all unfolds with the clarity and joyful inventiveness of the best silent films. The critique of today’s global consumer culture is strong enough to make the inevitable warm-hearted ending seem a failure of nerve, and there are one or two niggles with underdeveloped subplots, but I laughed, and I cried, and I’m going to see it again.
RAIN OF THE CHILDREN, directed by Vincent Ward.
WALL-E, directed by Andrew Stanton.
