The Piano (1993)

New Zealand / Australia / France, 121 minutes
Director / writer: Jane Campion
Photography: Stuart Dryburgh
Music: Michael Nyman
Editor: Veronika Jenet
Cast: Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill, Anna Paquin, Kerry Walker, Genevieve Lemon, Tungia Baker, Ian Mune

The Piano is as close as director and writer Jane Campion has ever got to the mainstream, with the possible exception of her adaptation of Henry James's Portrait of a Lady. It boasts a cast of bona fide Hollywood Oscar hunters, with three actual Oscars won plus nominations for five others, and a decent box office performance for an art film. And make no mistake, The Piano is an art film, with extraordinarily beautiful cinematography, rich with unexpected color and shadows, expert framing, blocking, and camera setups, and a story that feels like a fairy tale parable in its details and like a hallucinatory nightmare in its twists and turns. The Piano looks in one direction to movies such as Nicolas Roeg's mysterious Walkabout, also set Down Under and plumbing the spiritual depths and agonies of a world of empire and aborigines. It looks in another direction to pictures about surviving the isolated wilderness, to Aguirre, the Wrath of God and McCabe & Mrs. Miller and The Revenant, and no stinting on the rain, mud, and general misery.

Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter) is a young Scotswoman who has been mute since the age of 6, as she relates to us early in voiceover: "The voice you hear is not my speaking voice—but my mind's voice. I have not spoken since I was 6 years old. No one knows why—not even me." In other words, please accept this premise on its face. Fortunately, the voiceover device is used sparingly, only at the beginning and end of the picture, and we are otherwise quickly swept up into events that distract us from problems of believability. Hunter's fiercely imagined passion of Ada for music and playing her piano is startling, both in its extremes and in its ability to convince. It's the mid-19th century, and Ada has been promised in marriage by her father to Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill), a pioneer in the New World of New Zealand who wants a helpmeet on his frontier adventures—someone normal, we can tell instantly. What could possibly go wrong?



In the first 10 minutes of the picture we see the depths of Ada's devotion to her instrument, as the piano is hauled precariously by canoe from ship, and left on shore because the difficulty of hauling it through the jungle is one that Stewart does not want to deal with. At this point the shadowy Baines (Harvey Keitel) enters the picture. In 1993, Keitel's performance was perhaps the main word-of-mouth selling point for The Piano, as he has some relatively historic full-frontal nudity scenes. Baines is a white man but he is going native by degrees, adopting customs and ways of the Maori. He takes possession of the piano when Stewart trades it to him for some land—Ada is shocked because the piano is not even her husband's in the first place (well, except legally, of course). Baines uses the piano in an attempt to seduce Ada, to whom he is drawn for reasons he doesn't understand. Much like Ada doesn't understand why she won't speak.

It's a busy movie with a lot of mysteries like that. The cast alone is impressive. Ada has a daughter, Flora, who is played by yet another intriguing Hollywood star, Anna Paquin, then only 10. Paquin went on to make a really great kids movie, Fly Away Home, and a really great lost Kenneth Lonergan movie, Margaret, but she is probably better known now for X-Men movies and TV roles. Sam Neill is more the stolid action hero type but Campion finds ways to constantly worry the tension between his handsome rock-ribbed visage, his sexual naivete, and his ticking clock of rage. Keitel is good, as he always is, and Campion obviously liked working with him in this role, as he essentially reprises a variation of it in their 1999 collaboration, Holy Smoke. Part of me still resents the commotion around the nudity, but whatever it takes I guess. We needed Star Trek and coercion by aliens from outer space to make an interracial kiss happen. As for Holly Hunter, I want to deride her a little for so obviously taking a "stretch" role in search of Oscar (mission accomplished, btw), but the fact is that she is amazing in this movie, never speaking a word on camera and barely making vocal sounds, expressing herself with furiously scribbled notes, sign language, and more than anything her piano playing, which is really Hunter. She had to take lessons and learn to play it for this role, which makes it even more impressive.

I love the complexity in The Piano of the relationship between Ada and Baines. It is unafraid to veer into sickness, to let its characters recognize it as such and stay with it or change as they deem right. It's not the most relatable thing you'll ever see—the frontier love between a woman who won't speak, and doesn't know why, and a white man who wants to be an aborigine—but the complexities are what make it interesting at every step. More than that what I love about The Piano is exactly that—the piano. The sounds raised from it but also all the things it represents in that hostile wilderness, about ferocious devotion to self-expression, the extravagance of civilization, the necessity of love, the futility of empire. The Piano is never completely believable but it always almost is, which turns out to be a kind of ecstatic balancing point.