Kidman, Fiennes in crisis in Outback
The sandy barrens of Australia’s Outback provide one last test for a married couple on the brink in “Strangerland.” An all-star Australian melodrama with a superb cast and a striking setting, it’s an intimate story of running away from the past until you reach the very last place on Earth. And that’s where the past finally catches up with you.
The Parkers (Nicole Kidman, Joseph Fiennes) are new to town, seemingly a loving family but oddly out of place, and not just because none of them has a tan. Tommy (Nicholas Hamilton) is their younger child. But Dad’s orders to him are explicit, with regards to his teen sister Lily (Maddison Brown).
“Don’t let her out of your sight.”
One blinding dust storm later, and the fault lines in the family and the town show up. The siblings have disappeared. But the search parties feel halfhearted. The locals, led by Detective Rae (Hugo Weaving) suspect something. And the brittle ways each parent seems to accuse the other make us wonder.
Dad, meanwhile, is sure the last boys — and there turn out to have been many — to see Lily know something. Complicating matters is Detective Rae’s romantic connection to the sister of one possible suspect.
The cast plays this with a guarded caginess, and the script (by Michael Kinirons and Fiona Seres) serves up false leads and potential clues of equal weight. Did they run away? Did they simply get lost and die in the heat? Are they still out there, clinging to life?
That last possibility seems the most remote, as Kim Farrants directs one and all to show a lack of urgency. Moments of panic played by Kidman or Fiennes don’t make up for the long stretches of “Oh well, life goes on” pacing.
But Kidman has a wonderful resignation here, Fiennes a nervy-guilty edge. Weaving nicely suggests a smalltown cop forced to be deductive for perhaps the first time in his life.
But best of all is this setting — stark, reddish brown and sun-baked, the sort of place one only goes when every other possibility has been exhausted.