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The Piano
Ada ............. Holly Hunter
Baines .......... Harvey Keitel
Stewart ......... Sam Neill
Flora ...........
Anna Paquin
Aunt Morag ...... Kerry Walker
Nessie .......... Genevieve Lemon
Hira ............ Tungia
Baker
Miramax presents
a film written and directed by Jane Campion.
Produced by Jan Chapman. Photographed by Stuart Dryburgh. Edited by Veronika Jenet. Music by Michael Nyman. Running
time: 121 minutes. Classified: R (for moments of
Even if this picture does not win
the Academy Award for Best Picture, it has already won enough honors to
make a plausible claim to "Most Honored Film of 1993." Speaking
as a Christian, this fact is a little hard for me to understand. Although
the production values and performances are fine in this film, they are no
better than any number of other recent films. The setting is a rather
unpleasant group of primitive homes in a sea of mud somewhere in New
Zealand. New Zealand is a very beautiful country, but one sees little of
its beauty in this film, except of course for one beach, which is usually
presented as an omen rather than as something glorious. If the main
setting is muddy, the moral atmosphere is even muddier. Altogether,
this is not a setting to which I have any eagerness to return. As
for the plot, it is essentially the story of a woman trapped, to
some extent willingly, in a moral mire, from which she makes a kind
of escape at the end.
The woman Ada,
played by Holly Hunter, has been mute since the age of six. I assume from
the costumes that the action takes place sometime in the late nineteenth
century. She has borne a child out of wedlock, and evidently is now good
for nothing else than to leave England, becoming a mail-order
bride for Stewart, a pioneer landowner in New
Zealand. She arrives there with her child and her belongings, especially
the piano of the title. At first it is left on the beach, to her
great distress, because there aren't enough strong backs to carry it
to Stewart's house. Then George Baines, a neighbor of Stewart,
who sees Ada's great love for the instrument,
offers Stewart a trade for the piano. Baines brings it to his house and invites Ada to come over and give him lessons. He is, however,
more interested in Ada than in the music. She
plays, he listens and watches. Eventually, George and Ada
strike a bargain. She can buy back the piano by permitting George certain
sexual favors: one black key for an upraised skirt, five to give George a
look at her undraped arms, ten to lie for a while naked in bed with him.
Before they reach the logical
consequence, George realizes that he is turning Ada
into a whore. Repentant, but honestly in love with her, he gives her the
piano outright and tells her not to return. She still loves him, however,
and she does return to consummate their relationship. However, Stewart finds out, and, in his anger, he swings his axe and chops off part of one of her fingers. Upon
more cool reflection, however, he invites Ada
and the daughter to leave with George.
Naturally, the piano must also go
with them, although the native canoers say it is
too heavy. "It is a coffin," they say. When they are some
distance from shore, Ada announces that she
no longer wants the piano; they should throw it overboard. When they do,
they discover that she has tied her leg to it. She goes down with it. But
somewhere in the depths, she decides she wants to live after all. She
frees herself by removing the shoe that is tied to the piano and returns
to the surface. At the end of the film, she resumes her life in a much
more pleasant neighborhood, with her daughter and George. He fashions a
prosthesis for her finger, and she again takes up piano playing. And she
learns how to talk.
I'm reasonably sure that the
filmmakers view these events from a feminist perspective. Here is a woman
trapped by the double standards and general sexual oppression of her age,
who nevertheless takes her life into her own hands. It is she
who autonomously decides at age six not to talk any more. (Most talk
comes from stupid people, she tells her daughter in sign language. Or are
we to assume that Ada was abused as a child?)
It is she who bore an illegitimate child, she who determined to go to
New Zealand, she who determined to get her piano back by whatever means,
she who decided whom she would love (despite the mail-order arrangement),
she who decided to die, and then to live again.
Her piano playing (which Holly
Hunter does by herself quite skillfully) has an improvised feel to it (I
assume it is actually written by Michael Nyman),
though at one point she lapses into a Chopin
Prelude to fend off unwanted attentions. Most of her music sounds more
like a 1990s movie score than like the work of any nineteenth century
composer. I believe this fact reiterates the emphasis on autonomy. The
music, too, is Ada's own. In the music, she,
otherwise mute, expresses herself, particularly her passions. (When the
piano is moved from Baines's to Stewart's house, Ada resists
playing it, I gather because for her at this point any playing would
express her sexuality, and she has no feeling for Stewart.)
There is no God in this movie; Ada is Lord of
all.
The film also prefers autonomy in
the other characters. The native Maori people,
who perform menial jobs in the area, are rather contemptuous of the
whites; they lack "good manners," we are told by the older
ladies of Stewart's household. George Baines, though white, for some reason bears Maori markings on his face. Evidently, like the Maori, he does not accept all the strictures of Stewart's society. Ada (and the
film) chooses him over the strait-laced, respectable, hard-working Stewart. Ada herself, by
refusing to speak, rejects the good mannered society and communicates by
means of her own choosing.
I have little sympathy for the
film's message of autonomy and its commendations of bad manners. At the
same time, this film, like others which urge the modern secularist worldview, involuntarily records certain truths of
God's revelation. Where has Ada's autonomy
gotten her, after all? She must endure all the indignity of an unwed
mother, cart her child off to a strange and primitive land totally
unsuited to her musical interests, become the plaything of two men, lose
her finger and her desire to live. I must say that the loose shoe in the
ocean strikes me as a deus ex machina (or perhaps deus ex cinema?). I wanted her to live as much as did anybody in
the audience, but at this point it seemed to me that the film did a bit of
cheating. Having shown truly the wages of sin, it produced a
less-than-convincing resurrection.
Or should I think of the loose shoe
as God's grace, and her rising a newness of spiritual life? I'd like to
believe that. I doubt that the filmmakers had that idea in their heads
but, again, perhaps they saw something more profound than can
be accounted for in terms of their own autonomous feminism. Certainly
the piano, Ada's means of communicating lust, did
turn out to be a coffin for her, and it quite rightly ended up at
the bottom of the sea. May I see her freedom from that piano as
a liberation from sin?
And what of her new efforts to learn
speech at the end of the film? That says to me that she has transcended
her anger, her hatred, and, to some extent, her autonomous rebellion.
In Scripture, part of redemption is that God "opens our lips" (Psm. 51:15) and purifies them (Zeph.
3:9). Perhaps the filmmakers want us to believe that Ada
can achieve this redemption apart from the biblical God. As
self-salvation, their portrayal of this process is not very credible.
Understood as a divine act, however, her new life makes more sense. At any
rate, the filmmakers rightly see something of the change that must take
place if Ada is to be truly free.
There are graphic sexual scenes in
this film (unnecessarily graphic, in my opinion) which may pose a
spiritual danger to some Christians. Even more seductive, if we believe
the majority of the reviewers, is the film's message of
autonomous redemption. But if the film had acknowledged Christ, it
would have presented both a more credible redemption and a
better drama, a real Deus rather than a deus ex machina.