Lantana (2002)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

This is a complex drama. Although the film involves a murder, the story is more the exploration of a number of interconnected relationships.The film starts with a woman's body lying in a lantana bush, but we don't know who it is until the end. The story builds up to that point, and centres on a quartet of families starting with Leon Zat (Anthony La Paglia), a police detective, and his wife Sonja (Kerry Armstrong)."Lantana", the title of the film, refers to the noxious weed that grows like crazy and eventually strangles and entangles everything else in the garden - it's the perfect metaphor for the way all the various relationships are being strangled and entangled by infidelity, deception and unhappiness.The structure of the film is similar to Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" where different stories intersect at critical times.Although the film has a sense of mystery, I found "Lantana" just too serious and humourless. Unlike "Short Cuts", there really isn't a light touch in the whole thing. Anthony La Paglia's Leon Zat makes the characters played by Nicholas Cage seem deliriously happy by comparison. I am also wary in Australian movies of scenes set in psychiatrist's offices; it often allows the 'meaningful' dialogue to be delivered in very large chunks.After a while, for me at any rate, the interconnectivity - where no meeting is random - comes across as just a little too laboured. What saves "Lantana" is that everyone plays it low-key - the actors give the movie class.The brilliant Barbara Hershey has competition for attention from two other women: Kerry Armstrong and Rachael Blake. Kerry Armstrong is one of the most interesting actors in Australian film and television, and she ages beautifully.The film steps up a notch when the mystery kicks in about halfway through, and it becomes partly a police procedural."Lantana" was loved up by the critics and won every Australian film award going at the time it was released. It is the sort of smart, multi-layered film that the cognoscenti could discuss at some length over lattes on Sunday morning.The film is well made and the acting is flawless, but it seems interminably stretched out, an effect aided by the chilled out score. My main problem with "Lantana" is that it seems to self-consciously scream out "How clever is my script?" I can see the gears turning.

"Lantana" is an Australian drama from 2001 about four couples in the Sydney area (where the film was shot). There are some important peripheral characters as well. The husband of the main couple is a detective going through a mid-life crisis (Anthony LaPaglia). His wife (Kerry Armstrong) knows something's wrong and is getting counseling. The marriage of the counselor (Barbara Hershey) is also troubled due to the death of their young daughter a couple of years earlier. The woman the detective is having a fling with (Rachael Blake) thinks her neighbor (Vince Colosimo) may be involved in the counselor's mysterious disappearance. This is odd because the suspect's marriage is, ironically, the only solid relationship in the story. The counselor's husband is also a suspect (Geoffrey Rush) and has insightful things to share about marriage with the brooding detective.The reason the film's called "Lantana" is because lantana is a tangled shrub common in Australia, which represents the entanglements of the lives of the characters. It also symbolizes marriage since lantana has a sweet but bitter smell; it's beautiful with its flowers, but has "stings"; its branches weave together in a complicated way and in the story a woman is caught in the complexity of it."Lantana" is the antithesis of big, dumb, effects-laden "blockbusters," which -- oddly enough -- often become boring with their overload of "exciting" things going on. "Lantana" effectively shows that ordinary life is more interesting and compelling, if done right. Human nature is explored through a blend of passionate emotions, misconceptions, betrayals, anger, premature conclusions, vanity, duty, ethics, honesty, loyalty and repentance.Two of my all-time favorite dramas are "Grand Canyon" and "Snow Angels". I place "Lantana" in their company. That's how good it is.The film runs 121 minutes.GRADE: A

"Lantana" is an excellent film. Ostensibly a thriller, it is, in essence, a psychological drama about a number of middle-aged married couples whose paths cross and who are experiencing various degrees of marital and family difficulties. Set in what seems to be small-town Australia but is, in fact, a suburb of Sydney (judging by what is said in a news broadcast about one of the pivotal incidents of the plot), the story features a policeman, Leon Zat (brilliantly portrayed by Anthony LaPaglia). Zat is slap bang in the middle of a mid-life crisis. He is having an affair with a woman named Jane (Rachael Blake), who is separated from her husband. He has symptoms of possible coronary problems; he is violent towards suspects; and he is angry towards his wife, Sonja (Kerry Armstrong), and sometimes towards his lover. In one telling scene, he accidentally collides with a jogger in the street and loses his top with him before realising that he has overreacted. Sonja is seeing an American relationship counsellor, Valerie (Barbara Hershey), who is married to John (Geoffrey Rush). Valerie and John's marriage has been in difficulty since the death of their daughter a few years ago. It seems that Valerie suspects that John may be having a relationship with a gay man whom she is counselling. When Valerie herself disappears after her car breaks down late at night, suspicion falls on one of Jane's neighbours, Nik, who is happily married to Paula, with whom Jane has a good friendship. These interrelated stories form a credible plot that skilfully examines the emotional turbulence and pitfalls experienced by many people who are in their forties and which at the same time provides an entertaining puzzle. The acting in "Lantana" is superb. The screenplay is, for the most part, plausible (there is perhaps a slight over-reliance on coincidence in the way in which the lives of the principal characters intersect). It is also beautifully written. All of the characters are believable and fully fleshed out. The direction and the cinematography are first rate. And the soundtrack, which is primarily made up of Buena Vista Social Club-style Cuban dance music, is very entertaining. "Lantana" is an intelligent and entertaining film. 9/10. There is one slight mystery about the film. I may have missed something but I do not understand the reason for its title. Wikipedia suggests that "lantana" is a genus of a perennial flowering plant that is common in the Australian-Pacific region. But quite what that has to do with the film, even one whose opening scene is of a camera panning through a plantation that hides the limbs of a dead woman's body, is not immediately clear (to me, at least).

Lantana is an excellent drama that is executed with style and authority by the director Ray Lawrence, screen writer Andrew Bovell, DP Mandy Walker and a cast of superb actors. Lawrence directs Bovell's screenplay and the cast with confidence, and this is complemented by Walker's excellent photographic style using washed out colours and interesting lighting.Bovell's screenplay has the main characters interacting with each other through circumstance but the central story is that of La Paglia's police detective. Seeking solace from his marriage and potential heart problems, his affair with fellow salsa student is the springboard for the convoluted relationships within the story. The crime drama is merely a framework to hang the various stories of fractured relationships upon. Dr Somers, the counsellor played by Hershey, is so screwed up by the murder of her daughter she is unbalanced and paranoid. Thinking the gay client she interviews is having a relationship with her estranged husband played by Rush, she eventually ends up stranded in an isolated backwater after a car crash and when she is picked up by Nic, the neighbour of Detective Zat's lover, she believes he is about to rape her and throws herself from the car. When she fails to return home, and Nic is seen disposing of one of her shoes by Jane, Zat's lover, a full-blown murder investigation is soon underway.But this really just gives the viewer an insight to Nic's relationship with his wife, Hannah. A relationship built on trust and mutual respect. When Hannah tells Jane, her neighbour and Zat's lover, that he didn't commit the murder, Jane asks how she knows. Her reply is central to the theme of the movie, she tells Jane she knows because Nic told her he didn't do it. Their love for each other and belief in each other is very different to that experienced by the other three couples.Zat and his wife are just going through the motions, and as Sonja, Zat's wife, tells her counsellor, who happens to be Dr Somers, she wants much more from life. Detective Zat is going through his midlife crisis, unable to communicate with his wife and it is his youngest son who, by fabricating his father's response in a phone call, allows his mother to see that she still has strong feelings for her husband. And Zat's lover, Jane, eventually sees the good in her own estranged husband.So really a story about couples' relationships and the inability to be honest and share innermost feelings, but filmed through the backdrop of a crime drama. Brilliantly executed by a fantastic team of technicians and actors.