Does it Shine?

Further thoughts on the phenomenon

by Gerald Peary

The good folks behind the Oscars must have been apprehensive about David Helfgott live after reading those calamitous reports of the Australian pianist's East Coast concert tour. Music critics (including

this paper's Lloyd Schwartz) wrote in embarrassed agreement that (a) the real-life version of the up-from-insanity Shine protagonist remains an unbalanced, unwell man, and (b) his piano playing is spasmodic, arrhythmic, and totally unworthy of the concert hall.

Still, Helfgott went on as promised at the Academy Awards, and he got away with a finger-exercise Flight of the Bumblebee on a dubious music night of torch songs from Kenny Loggins and Celine Dion. He played fast and tricky, piling on intertwined notes, and lost the rhythm only a couple of times.

Geoffrey Rush, as everyone predicted, got Best Actor for his unerring Shine re-creation of Helfgott's buzzed, Lucky-in- Waiting for Godot riffs and huggy Harpo Marx personality. Otherwise, Shine was stepped on by The English Patient in every Oscar category where it was nominated.

Is that because The English Patient is such an unbelievably strong film? Or was it that Helfgott's concert debacle made Shine lovers hesitate on their ballots, made them wonder whether the film hadn't duped them. Who can defend Shine's sunshine, holistic, on-stage ending, which cajoles us to believe that today's Helfgott not only plays beautifully but is closing in on achieving mental stability?

What else about Shine has been put to question?

For one thing, the "true" character of Peter Helfgott (Armin Mueller-Stahl), David's tormented dad, who's characterized as a bullying control freak. Twice in Shine he physically assaults his son, swatting David with a towel in a bathtub and slapping him around for wanting to study in England.

Shine writer/director Scott Hicks based Peter Helfgott on David's remembrances to him of his father, remembrances consistent with what the pianist told Beverley Eley for her biography The Book of David: "Daddy was jealous. Daddy was cruel . . . Daddy never stopped screaming." Yet other family members have kinder memories. David's sister, Margaret, wrote to the Australian publication the Age that their father had an "optimistic, lively and joyful nature" and that it was "not less than a travesty to depict him striking his beloved David . . . "

Aussie journalists Greg Burchall and Michelle Symes telephoned Peter Helfgott's widow, Rae Helfgott, in Israel for a reaction to Shine. "It haunts me day and night," she said. "I feel evil has been done."

Is she protecting her husband? Is Margaret lying?

All of us experience family life in radically different ways, so we'll never know for sure whether David's mental travails were caused by patriarchal duress or whether nature's the culprit instead of nurture. Nature? As David Helfgott himself said on another day, "I was born fragile, father said, I was just born that way. He said I was a nervous baby. Just born like that."

The New Times' LA-based Peter Rainer was one of the earliest reviewer of Shine to express surprise that the father is blamed for David's breakdown "even though the split between the valiant introvert that David was and the screw-loose jabberer he becomes is so decisive that some sort of neurological explanation may be closer to the truth." Rainer's skeptical conclusion for why Shine chose to scapegoat Peter Helfgott: "Physiology doesn't play as well as Freud."

Finally, is the movie being disingenuous about the cause of Peter Helfgott's pathology, something dark he left back in Europe. The Holocaust, perhaps?

This may surprise Shine viewers: Peter Helfgott was not a Holocaust victim, though some of his relatives were killed by Hitler. Doesn't the film insinuate otherwise? Scott Hicks shoots Mueller-Stahl's Peter standing before barbed wire as he tells David, "Life is cruel, but you have to survive." Also, David babbles about "Daddy and his family before they were concentrated." Finally, Peter reveals to David's sister something on his forearm that many viewers are assuming to be a concentration-camp number.

Hicks is certainly playing Holocaust head games with the Shine audience. Still, the film's Peter Helfgott never quite claims he's a camp survivor. When Peter mentions suffering, he alludes to "my sisters . . . my mother and father." And though no one seems to remember this, in fact his daughter asks, "Show us where the lion scratched you," before Peter holds out his arm. Audiences might be reading in Auschwitz, but the daughter is referring to something that happened in real life: employed in a circus, he was clawed by a lion.

I know these things from a second viewing of Shine. I'm still not sure why, but I went from disliking the movie the first time to coming, grudgingly, to respect it as a very clever, albeit misleading, melodrama. It's no Fargo or Secrets and Lies, but Shine tainted might have been a more acceptable choice for Best Picture than the insufferably safe, well-bred The English Patient.