Little Fish
Yes, here we have another fucking Australian film about love & heroin. If I was from another country, and dumb enough to actually believe that the collective film output of a nation actually reflects that country's attitudes and environment, I'm not sure I would ever want to set foot on Australian land. If the natives aren't all drunken idiosyncratic ocker drongos then they're probably going to be smacky star-crossed lovers. Or they're Bryan Brown.
Thankfully Little Fish doesn't fall into the trap of simply waxing poetic about the love/hate relationship every smacky has with their drug of choice, nor do we have to sit through another dreary detox montage or overdose sequence. Instead the focus of the film is an ex-addict, who is desperately trying to make a better life for herself, while remnants of her past continue to weigh her down and just might engulf her again.
There's not a hell of a lot to the story, but great performances (nearly) across the board really do make it more stirring than it probably deserves to be. Blanchett is as amazing and subtle as ever while Hugo Weaving gets three or four words out and I'm already sold on his character. The only slight hiccup is the Asian dude from 21 Jump Street . While the film automatically gets cool points for resurrecting this guy, his accent is very choppy, and even though they explain this off as his character being an Australian-Vietnamese recently returned from living in Canada , I'm guessing the whole ‘ Canada ' thing was probably written in just to cover his obvious lilt.
The quality performances are let down by a most unsatisfying ending. It really forces all the sub-plots to come to a head and collide, and the violent conclusion isn't the jilting shock it was probably supposed to be, but rather feels like a cop out, like it was thrown in just to make things a little more interesting. And then in a horrible final scene, everyone goes for a swim at the beach, after which, purged of their sins and baptised anew, they presumably live happily ever after. Kind of against what I thought the film was supposed to be about, but who can resist such handy blatant symbolism?