Blueback: A Fish Tale That’s Easy on The Eyes
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C
The family movie Blueback offers a variation on the perennially popular fables about kids and their animal pals. While limited by a weak script, the film has beautiful locations, an over-qualified Australian cast, and a novel companion.
The creature in question — which Abby first meets and names while scuba-diving on her eighth birthday — is a blue groper, a cobalt-coloured reef fish with coat-button eyes and Mick Jagger lips that’s about as big and inquisitive as a medium-sized dog. It’s played by a credibly realistic-looking animatronic puppet.
Blueback’s habitat, near the southwest Australian shore, is the fictional Longboat Bay, next to the beachside home of Abby and her widowed mothe, Dora, who makes a living collecting and selling abalone. When the bay is threatened by over-fishing and development, Abby and her mother fight back.
The film was adapted by director Robert Connolly from a 1997 youth novel by prolific Australian writer Tim Winton, switching the main character from a boy to a girl. The director has assembled a cast of internationally known adult Australian stars, including Mia Wasikowska as the adult Abby, Radha Mitchell as her fiery activist mother, Dora and, in a brief enjoyable turn as a convivial local fisherman, Erica Bana.
The film begins gracefully underwater as the adult Abby, a marine scientist, collects samples from the coral reef. After surfacing, she checks in to report her findings to the denizens of the onboard fish tank. “It’s not good news, I’m afraid. Your home is dying, and I don’t know how to help.”
More bad news immediately follows. A call from a hospital, telling her that her mother has had a stroke. Abby heads back home and the movie begins alternating between scenes in which Abby tries to help her ailing mother (played in later scenes by Liz Alexander) recover her ability to speak, and flashbacks to Abby’s youth.
In the memory scenes, little-girl Abby is played by an eight-year-old Ariel Donaghue and teenage Abby by Ilsa Fogg. An artist and scholar, Abby is determined to leave home to study and join the global environmental fight, and is frequently at odds with her hot-headed mother.
When Dora is stymied in her attempt to stop a local developer and save the bay area as a nature preserve, the articulate 15-year-old Abby steps in, explains what is at stake, and shows them her water-colours pictures of the threatened species.
The mother-daughter conflict between local and planetary concerns is not well developed, and in general, scenes involving human interaction feel flat, with the functional dialogue of episodic television. Everything seems much clearer, and more magical, whenever the camera goes under the surface, the dialogue stops, and Nigel Westlake’s string-heavy score fills the soundtrack.
Blueback. Directed by Robert Connelly. Written by Robert Connolly and Tim Winton, from the novel by Tim Winton. Starring Mia Wasikowska, Radha Mitchell, Ilsa Fogg, Liz Alexander, Ariel Donaghue, and Eric Bana. Opens in theatres nationwide March 10.