141: The Last Wave

Consider the following retrospective pitch: “It’s A Time to Kill (1996) meets Stir of Echoes (1999) meets a tidal wave disaster film.”  Therein you have Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977).  Weir is the Australian director responsible for Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), The Truman Show (1996), and Master and Commander (2003) as well as several pre-export Mel Gibson films, and has earned his place with film fanatics as a multi-title Criterion approved director.  Along with Hanging Rock this 1977 effort has been deemed worthy of the Collection treatment.  At first it can be difficult to see why, but Weir’s picture is just strange enough to warrant such reverence (and it’s certainly more worthy of canonization than anything in the 2- volume anthology of Stan Brakhage).

            Television regular Richard Chamberlain does solid work in this feature as David Burton, an ambitious young attorney brought in to defend a group of Aboriginals being charged with a somewhat bizarre murder.  His case depends on justifying the killing as a tribal ritual, but both the system and the defendants themselves seem to be working against him.  Their customs are guarded in secret and to reveal that they are the last remaining members of a tribe native to Sydney could threaten their sacred underground landmarks. 

            Meanwhile the city and the continent have been experiencing unprecedented weather patterns.  Hail falls in the middle of the desert and black rain coats the Sydney streets.  The weather bears a strange resemblance to the events of Burton’s dreams and he begins to wonder whether he may be a clairvoyant.  In either case the dreams become more and more vivid as they start to invade his waking visions as well.  Water, namely in the form of the aforementioned rain, is prominently featured here as it so often is as a metaphor for the fragility of human life.  It both grants and shapes our existence, but can also be a source of our demise, as it was in the case of the murder victim.  If this film were up for a remake, Sam Mendes would be the logical choice of Director, as he so significantly employs this symbolic use of H2O, often working it to death.

            As the plot unfolds the connection between Burton and his defendants grows.  He fights to have the courts recognize their rights under tribal law as he learns that he has been blessed with a gift of vision uncommon outside of their lineage.  The film is set up from the beginning as a sort of mystery, but doesn’t really get going until the second half.  It’s not quite exciting enough throughout to be labeled a “thriller,” and not quite focused enough to be a drama.  In this respect, the courtroom scenes feel rather flat and don’t deliver much on their promise.  By the time they do come around the film has moved in another direction. 

            As burtons visions grow stronger and the real world events and dangerous weather begin to affect his young family, he seeks out a final confrontation with the men whom he defended.  Being led back to the place of the genesis of the crime, he crawls deeper and deeper under the city.  After trudging through knee-deep sewage systems he finally reaches the ancient religious grounds of the Aboriginal tribe.  What transpires therein and thereafter makes for one of the oddest ending of a movie that I can recall.  Weir is both ambiguous and ambitious here, seeming to predict the very end of the world.  This isn’t a picture that’s engaging throughout, but it does have moments of tangible expression and surprise.  It also tugs at some philosophical questions regarding the meaning and importance of laws in the western mindset.  It might be all over the map, but it does stop in some interesting locales.

Grade: 2.5 Hats Off