The obvious, underlying message of Blueback – that life within the seas of this planet is precious and currently under the strain of manmade climate change – is an admirable one. It’s laid on thick in writer/director Robert Connolly’s movie, which tells two stories that are (ironically) too thin to support the weight of such heavy-handed symbolism. In the present, we follow a young woman through the motions of returning to her old stomping grounds, just as something significant is happening to the marine life there, but that half of the story comes to nothing particularly significant or meaningful. The past informs the present by filling in the gaps of information that are lacking in what ultimately amounts to a series of flash-forwards.
Most curiously, Connolly does seem to want us to believe that this story is being told in the present, but the strange thing about his discombobulated screenplay is that all the stakes reside in the past. Mia Wasikowska might receive top billing for playing the adult version of Abby, a marine biologist called back to Australia to take care of her mother, Dora (Liz Alexander), who has suffered a stroke. Other events there serve to remind her of her childhood and upbringing under the stern eye of her mother, an environmental activist whose passion was carried down to her daughter. Abby, though, also inherited an independence that eventually led to a desire to leave her home and fashion a new life somewhere else.
Wasikowska communicates much of this through contemplative looks and pregnant pauses in conversations with an old friend and in those visits with mom. The real story of Connolly’s screenplay follows Abby at a younger age – first as a child (played by Ariel Donoghue) and then as a teenager (played by Ilsa Fogg) – as she learns of the existential threat to the bay and the more humanistic threat to the inhabitants of it. Inevitably, this becomes a story about a child and the endangered being she befriends, just before an incredible disaster. Abby imprints upon one specific fish in that bay by her home – a blueback grouper who might become a casualty of a corporate fishing enterprise.
Dora, played in the past by Radha Mitchell (it’s sort of odd that Connolly recasts actors to play every character at different ages, instead of investing in some sort of makeup prosthetics), and local fisherman Macka (Eric Bana) do the hard work of investigating the company and protesting their infringement upon the life in those waters. Elsewhere, Abby bonds with that fish, before attempting to save its life multiple times – to the chagrin of the cartoonishly evil and condescending businessmen who don’t give a flying fig about their own actions.
It’s easy and even right to vilify such cronyism and late-stage capitalism in tribute to a genuinely urgent crisis. Perhaps the failing of Blueback is that it lacks the courage of its convictions to go further, as well as, apparently, the storytelling skill to do more than pay tribute to a crisis. All that we get is a series of earnest performances, a lot of lip service to activism and a feeling that the drama here is incomplete.
Photo courtesy of Amor Media
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