Shine Review date: January 19, 1997 Reviewed by: Kevin Drum Overall grade: B Directed by: Scott Hicks Screenplay by: Jan Sardi Starring: Geoffrey Rush, Noah Taylor, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Lynn Redgrave, Googie Withers Running time: 105 minutes MPAA rating: PG-13

Am I just getting too jaded, or what? Shine has gotten terrific reviews, and it's not a bad movie, but it just doesn't seem as good as everything I've read about it. It's the story of David Helfgott, a child prodigy pianist who is raised by an overbearing father and eventually has a nervous breakdown. The problem with Shine is that the story just isn't quite interesting enough. Helfgott's father is short-tempered, but not psychotically so, which makes it hard to figure out just why Helfgott goes nuts. And Helfgott himself never really does anything quite worth writing a movie about.

The characters in Shine are sometimes engaging, but we never really learn what motivates them. The psychological angle in the movie, played just a little too unsubtly, has to do with the father's love of Rachmaninoff, which is apparently too difficult for a child to learn. "We'll start with Mozart," his teacher insists early in the movie, and the father reluctantly agrees.

Rachmaninoff comes up several more times (just to make sure we haven't missed his importance), and finally, after Helfgott has estranged himself from his father by accepting a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London, he tells his tutor that he wants to play Rachmaninoff's 3rd piano concerto in an upcoming competition. "The Rach 3? That's madness," says the tutor. Yeah, right. Helfgott goes on to play the Rach 3, and of course it's a triumph, but at the end he keels over and wakes up in a hospital. The last third of the movie chronicles his partial recovery and return to the concert circuit.

In a movie like this I wish I had learned more about the music and how it's played, but the focus was entirely on Helfgott's personality. Shine was watchable and interesting throughout, but it wasn't compelling. It could have been a better movie.

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