Film adaptation of Ibsen play worthy of Wild Duck’s flock
Live theatre — Phantom of the Opera, The Lion King and SpiderMan notwithstanding — is not a venue known for its special effects. All the more reason why playwrights of old focused on language, drama — and acting.
There’s plenty of all three on display in The Daughter, an adaptation by Simon Stone of Henrik Ibsen’s 1884 play The Wild Duck. The first-time feature filmmaker also mounted a live production in his native Australia before turning to this cinematic version, which features some fine flourishes, switching from jumpy hand-held to rock-steady camerawork, and sometimes letting image and sound unsync and overlap.
An introduction to the sprawling, interconnected cast is actually more confusing in print than on the screen. Christian (Paul Schneider) has just returned to his small hometown in New South Wales for the marriage of his father, Henry (Geoffrey Rush), to his former — and significantly younger — housekeeper (Anna Torv). Christian quickly falls in with his old friend Oliver (Ewen Leslie), whose wife Charlotte (Miranda Otto), also used to work for Henry.
Actually, most of the town has worked for Henry in one capacity or another. The old man is a logging magnate, just now in the process of overseeing the closure of the business. This casts something of a pall over Christian’s return and Henry’s impending nuptials. And it’s not helping matters that Henry can deliver only bland platitudes — “It’s never too late to start again” — to his shattered workforce.
Also central to the plot is Odessa Young as Hedvig, Oliver’s bright, headstrong teenage daughter. When Christian starts to piece together some of the relationships that permeate the town like tangled clumps of seaweed, Hedvig ends up at a nexus.
A story like this lives or dies on the dramatic chops of its personae, and Stone has chosen well; his cast know when to underplay their emotional cards, and when to go for broke, with Otto a particular standout on both counts. Schneider is the only really false note, and that’s only because he doesn’t sound like someone who grew up in New South Wales — and that’s only because he grew up in North Carolina. Fair dinkum.
But for that matter, Ibsen was Norwegian, and wrote his play when the convict-seeded New South Wales was less than a century old. The Wild Duck was, coincidentally, last translated to the screen in a 1984 Australian production that moved the action to 1913 Tasmania. That one was carved up like — well, like a wild duck — by New York Times critic Vincent Canby, who called it “a flightless fowl.”
In contrast, this one soars.