Sydney Film Festival 2006: River Queen

River Queen, directed by Vincent Ward 2005.

When a film is loaded with acting talents like Kiefer Sutherland and Samantha Morton, you would hope that the finished product would be quite good. Yet, like is too often the case, I left the theater with the sour tinge of being let down.

Perhaps I am being a little too harsh. I did enjoy the film, yet it could have been so much better than what it is. The project was helmed by Vincent Ward, whose last directorial effort was the mediocre What Dreams May Come although he has since been involved with projects such as The Last Samourai. As the movie went on it became more and more obvious to me that Ward was unable to censor himself and as such was crippling the movie by trying to squeeze to many ideas into one film.

Arising loosely from Ward's own experiences with the native Maori tribes of New Zealand, this tale is taken partially from the true story of a woman who was kidnapped as a child only to be discovered decades later.

River Queen is set during the colonial times of New Zealand. A period in which the Maori tribes ended up fighting each other because of differing beliefs on what was the best route to retain their land. Amidst this setting is Samantha Morton's character, Sarah O'Brien, who has a had a child with a Maori man. The Maori man dies, but the grandfather of the child returns to kidnap him, leading Sarah to spend the next eight years of her life trying to find her son. She is eventually successful, but he is not the same son that she knew from years before.

The film fascillates between being a period piece, an attempted epic complete with 'grand' battle sequences, a smaller character drama ending up being ok on all counts but not truly good on any of these levels. What is more surprising is the fact that the special effects are at times painfully bad. A lot of things can be said about What Dreams May Come but one thing that is very notable about that particular film is its visual striking flair. For whatever reason, that is at times completely lost in River Queen.

The acting is on a level of what you would expect from the likes of Morton and Sutherland, but in the end its not enough to save this unfocused collage of a film. Despite all this I did enjoy the film, but its definitely not anything near what I would term as a great film.

** and a half stars.