By Sandra Hall
PENGUIN BLOOM ★★★½
PG, 95 minutes, in cinemas
There’s a certain predictability in a film which takes Naomi Watts on a family holiday to Thailand. Whenever she’s there, trouble will surely follow.
Naomi Watts and the magpie in the film Penguin Bloom.
In The Impossible (2012), she played somebody caught up in the 2004 tsunami and in Penguin Bloom, she’s cast as Sam Bloom, a Sydney woman whose back was broken in a fall from a hotel balcony at a Thai resort in 2013.
The film is adapted from a highly successful book by Sam’s husband, Cameron, a professional photographer, and author Bradley Trevor Greive. Both Blooms were consultants on the film and its account of Sam’s fight to regain her taste for living after finding herself unable to walk is both harrowing and heartening.
She was a surfer whose self-esteem was bound up in her athleticism and in the pleasure she took in the supremely strenuous business of bringing up three boys. And after the accident, the mere sight of the waves breaking on the beach below the Bloom house at Newport brings her nothing but pain.
But the element which distinguishes the account of her rehabilitation from any other is the avian adventure story which runs in tandem with it. Noah (Griffin Murray Johnston), the eldest of the Bloom boys, finds a baby magpie on the beach shortly after it’s tumbled from its nest and brings it home. And since the house is already in a state of domestic chaos, Sam doesn’t exactly welcome the squawking presence of a creature that doesn’t know when to shut up.
The three boys lift the energy in Penguin Bloom.Credit: Joel Pratley
Watts has always been a talent who needs little dialogue to telegraph her feelings. She knows how to make the most of every silence and there’s no doubting the anger behind the show of stoicism with which she faces her helplessness. But it’s a film skewed to a family audience and the inevitable changes in her relationship with Cameron (Britain’s Andrew Lincoln), whose life is consumed with the need to keep the household running, are relegated to a sketchily drawn sub-plot. Centre stage is their role as parents. Sam particularly worries about Noah, who’s secretly brooding on the fact that it was he who suggested they go on to the hotel roof with the rotten balcony rail.
The magpie – christened Penguin simply because he’s black and white – becomes the circuit breaker in this undeclared standoff between mother and son. As he hops around the house, the Blooms gradually learn to translate his squawks while mopping up the droppings and he gains weight and confidence. At the same time, he clearly displays his affection for Noah and Sam. And as she watches him grow, she slowly opens up to the possibility that her own life’s limits may not be dictated by her wheelchair.
It’s a film keyed to ambiance rather than plot. The director, Glendyn Ivin, a veteran of television drama, shot much of it in the Blooms’ house, which crystallises everything about the family’s way of life. It’s given Sam and the boys everything they want and the boys still see it that way, hurtling through it and treating the nearby beach and bushland as their personal playground. But to Sam, the beach is now a lost Eden and when she’s feeling low, the house becomes a prison, resonating with memories of the self that she’s lost.
It sounds grim and at times it is. The dialogue doesn’t exactly crackle with humour yet the boys keep the film’s energy levels up with the natural verve of kids enjoying what they’re doing. And Murray Johnston has an engaging wistfulness as the only one of the three who can slow down long enough to reflect on the meaning of what’s happened to their mother.
And finally, to offset any hint of claustrophobia, there’s Jacki Weaver, breezing through the action as Sam’s mother, who’s always ready for a drink together with a full and frank discussion of what’s best for her beloved daughter. It’s during these scenes that Lincoln’s finely rendered portrayal of the beleaguered Cameron comes into its own.
It’s not the best Australian film about a young family in crisis. My favourite is still Sarah Watt’s candidly funny and tender My Year Without Sex (2009) but the Blooms have a lot of heart. You’re unlikely to forget them.