Audiences open to an ecological ocean drama that’s gentler, more grounded and certainly more ‘Strayan than James Cameron’s squillion-dollar screensaver can find an appealing – if slight – companion piece in the latest Tim Winton adaptation, brought to the screen by writer-director Robert Connolly.
Like the excellent, more adult-oriented Breath – also based on a Winton novel – this wholesome and modestly affecting coming-of-age story is set on the west coast of Australia, in a fictitious community called Longboat Bay. It’s a family-friendly, broadly appealing film that expands the canon of coastal Aussie pictures involving interspecies mateship – the original and remade Storm Boy, featuring Mr Percival the pelican, and Oddball, featuring a very photogenic Maremma sheepdog that saves a colony of penguins in Victoria.
Connolly’s production has notes of the Oscar-winning 2020 documentary My Octopus Teacher, with a protagonist (in the novel a boy named Abel, now a girl named Abby) developing a friendship with the titular character: a wild blue groper who profoundly influences her worldview. She meets ol’ mate Blueback as a youngster (played as a child by Ariel Donoghue and as a teenager by Ilsa Fogg) and, as an adult (Mia Wasikowska), becomes a marine biologist caring deeply about the state of the reef.
In an early scene, after examining a piece of coral, she delivers sad news to fish on her boat: “Your home is dying and I don’t know how to help.” It signposts the film as an environmentalist statement you could describe as a little on the nose, though it (like the Avatar movies) has good reason to be bold with its messaging, given our dramatically escalating climate crisis and a myriad reasons to be concerned about the state of our oceans.
Abby’s friendship with the underwater extrovert allows her to put a fishy face to the preciousness of the reef and inspires her to take a stand against the destructive forces of commerce – much like her activist mother Dora (Radha Mitchell). Mitchell imbues Dora with headstrong warmth, humanity and vividness as she engages in direct action – including chaining herself to a truck in front of a crowd chanting, “Save our bay”. Later, an older Dora – who has suffered a stroke – is played in a smaller and more limited role by Liz Alexander.
Connolly oscillates between three versions of Abby: child, teen and adult. Moving between and integrating these timelines becomes a core structural challenge. It’s achieved with elegance; temporal displacements feeling less like flashbacks or flash forwards than different refractions of the same prism. The joins feel fluid, sometimes seamless. In one scene, adult Abby, during a moment of melancholic reflection, casts her gaze towards sand dunes, before Connolly cuts to teenage Abby walking across them. A simple but effective way of saying: she is remembering.
Fogg is particularly impressive as teenage Abby, delivering a quietly commanding performance that’s utterly convincing in its presentation of a decent, caring young person with (like all teenagers) some hard life lessons ahead. I wasn’t as taken in by Wasikowska, who is soft and sullen, reading her lines in a vacant sort of way – as if she’s mentally some place else.
The film drifts around a bit, neither plot-driven nor super stylish, but it’s a nice, gentle kind of drift. Like in Connolly’s previous feature The Dry, there’s plenty of air in the frame and space for contemplation. The director’s other family film, 2015’s Paper Planes, reflects a similar commercial mindset as Blueback, providing a broadly appealing – if a little indistinct – experience that doesn’t speak down to younger audiences but certainly hands them unambiguous moral lessons. Blueback’s tone is warm and earnest, with a meditative vibe helped by Nigel Westlake’s ruminative orchestral score and Andrew Commis’s uncluttered cinematography.
Blueback is in cinemas around Australia from 1 January
