Shine

Shine is a beautiful and uplifting film about piano virtuoso David Helfgott's long and arduous road to personal and professional success. The film focuses on the relationship between David and his tyrannical father, Peter Helfgott, who transfers his unfulfilled dreams onto his son. Peter raises his son to be a genius, but when David is offered a prestigious education in London, his father denies him the opportunity. The father is an Eastern European Jew who has seen his family torn apart, so he wants to keep the family together at any cost. For the first time David defies his father, with the result that the father disowns him.

The film offers no clear answers as to what causes David's mental breakdown after a seemingly successful course of study and career with the gifted Cecil Parkes as his teacher, but one senses that David's whole warped upbringing and his father's rejection of him play a large part.

When we meet David Helfgott again, he has become a mature man whose mind is on the mend. Several people try to help the behaviourally troubled David, but fortune only really smiles on him when he meets his friend Sylvia's friend Gillian, and the two get married. The ending is almost too good to be true.

The three actors who play Helfgott as a child, a young man and an adult respectively do an excellent job. What is more, the transitions between the three stages are imperceptible.

My only objection to Shine is that it depicts the life of a man who is still alive. The film actually ends in the present day. With that knowledge it is hard for the audience to distinguish between the film's fiction and plain reality, and the film becomes a kind of thinly veiled advertisement for Helfgott. He may well have earned it, at least according to the film, but it is an unfortunate tendency that also weighs down the Russell Crowe hit "A Beautiful Mind".