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Tis the season for actors and their like to get together and toast each other. It's also the one time of year when critics are actually called out from their relegated obscurity and invited to sit down at the fancy table.
And this year critics have bestowed their ounce of prestige on flamboyant movies like Mulholland Drive and Gosford Park and the big-budget power of A Beautiful Mind and Lord of the Rings.

Lost in all the reverie is a little but imminently worthy film called Lantana. Like Gosford Park, it features a large, interlocking group of characters and a plot that hinges on a crime. But in contrast to Altman's "masterpiece," director Ray Lawrence offers an understated and yet much more powerful take on love and loss.

Anthony LaPaglia is Leon, a cop whose wife Sonja (Kerry Armstrong) and two teenage boys mean a great deal to him but not enough to fill the void growing ever larger in his life. To compensate, he engages in a clumsy affair with Jane (Rachel Blake) in a motel room. The sex might be good, but he doesn't feel any better when it's done. His only substantial relationship is with his female partner, which involves some harmless
flirting and genuine compassion. Compassion is something Leon doesn't have enough of. He's a brutal and effective cop, using violence and intimidation to pursue his investigations.

On the other side of the coin, Valerie (Barbara Hershey) is a psychiatrist with too much compassion. She empties herself into her clients without ever challenging them to move ahead, and her relationship with her husband John (Geoffrey Rush) has stalled because of his emotional distance and her inability to call him on it. It doesn't help that the two had a young daughter who was murdered two years before, and their ways of dealing with that loss are wildly different. In coincidences that feel completely natural, Sonja has started coming to Valerie in the hope of restoring her marriage while taking a dance class that Jane is also attending. There's also a young family who live next to Jane that will figure prominently before the movie is over.

One of the many great things about Lantana is how screenwriter Andrew Bovell slowly brings these characters together. The relationships feel right, and the dialogue is sharp without ever losing its realism. When Jane tries to see Leon again, he yells, "It's not an affair, it's a one-night stand that happened twice," before he realizes how bad that sounds. Ray Lawrence's direction contributes mightily to this constricting web of relationships. Many scenes begin with the sound of the previous one lingering in the air, forcing the audience to wonder how the two relate. Then, once the audience thinks it has everything figured out, the film
takes a right turn when one of the characters goes missing. And unlike Gosford Park, where the murder doesn't make a lick of difference, here the potential crime forces the characters and us to re-evaluate everything we know, and what we thought we knew often turns out to be wrong.

The acting in Lantana is absolutely first-rate. LaPaglia gives the performance of his career as a middle-aged cop trying to do the right thing while often missing the point. If awards shows weren't so obsessed with
celebrities, LaPaglia might have had a chance at this year's Globes, etc.Geoffrey Rush is his usual stand-out self in a role that's much more subtle than he usually takes on. And it's impossible to pick out a favorite from
the trio of actresses, who all give powerful portrayals, each offering a different side of how women endure the difficulties of marriage.

In last week's Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum praised Gosford Park for "its smartness about the relations between servants and their employers." And we can only hope that this year the Coen brothers will enlighten us about the relations between knights and their lieges, or Jim Jarmusch will illuminate the tricky dealings between kings and their cupbearers, or, if we're lucky, Ang Lee will expose the relevant details of lords-a-leaping and ladies dancing. Oh wait, there aren't any relative details.

Now, I don't have an inherent problem with period pieces, but their strength is not in their ability to teach us history. If you want to know about the long-outdated estate class system in England, go read a book. But
if you want to better understand the human condition or ponder the nature of love in contemporary society or experience how crime necessarily affects our relationships, then Lantana is your movie. 

J. Robert Parks 1/22/2002