We often see stories about how mental problems affect the rich and
successful. Imagine how much worse mental illness must be for the
poor. That's the subtext of this film, even though it is ostensibly
about a father-son relationship. The story is about real people, as
recounted in a prize-winning memoir. The late Romulus Gaita was an industrious German emigrant who
ended up around the world in Victoria, where he struggled to build a
good rural life in the 1950s and 60s with his German wife, Christina. His story
was related, as implied by the title, by his own child, Raimond
Gaita, who is a philosopher and a respected professor in England.
The great tragedy of Romulus's life was not his struggle to survive
a hardscrabble existence, which he faced with unswerving
determination, but that fact that the effort was made so much
more difficult by a deeply troubled wife. As the film begins,
Christina has tired of the rural life and has run off with a family
friend to live in Melbourne. She comes back for frequent visits,
during which she sleeps with Romulus, leaving both father and son
hopeful that she will eventually decide to return for good. These
hopes are dashed when she announces that she is pregnant again with
the other man's child.
The story portrays the impact of Christina's mental illness on all
of the people around her, not just her husband and son, but her lover
and their daughter as well. In a sense it demonstrates the way in
which mental illness can be contagious, because her unpredictable
behavior and her inability to see beyond her own immediate desires
leads those who love her to their own breaking points. Romulus was a
survivor, but just barely, and only after having spent some of his own
life in a mental health facility.
This is an Aussie arthouse film with genuine and fully dimensional
characters drawn from life, and acted with great sensitivity. I have
greatly underestimated Eric Bana. Because he started as a stand-up
comedian and impersonator, because his first international
appearances were in films that focused on his pecs, and because one of
his later films was ungodly awful, I have kind of a knee-jerk reaction
to his name which is similar to the one I have for (let's say)
Brigitte Nielsen. That's obviously not fair, as demonstrated by his
recent performances as Henry VIII and as Romulus, but I wonder how long it
will be before I stop reacting that way. Bana did a great job in this
film, and his performance was matched by the other adult males, as
well as by Franka Potente and the child who plays Raimond, who turned in
about the deepest performance from a boy since The Sixth Sense. Six
different members of the cast were nominated for Aussie Oscars by
the AFI, and the film received a total of 16 AFI nominations, winning
four. The photography is so outstanding that I don't know how it could have lost for Best Cinematography.
I haven't seen the winner (The Home Song Stories), but I assume it must make
Days of Heaven look like an Ed Wood film.
Romulus is an excellent film in many respects, but you should be
forewarned that the story is totally downbeat. Although we know that Rai grew up to be successful and that Romulus lived to a ripe old age
and eventually remarried, the portion of their lives portrayed in the
film contains far more despair than hope. Every time something in the story seems to get better,
it soon makes a 180 and gets even worse than it was. After you watch
this film, you could put on some Leonard Cohen songs to lighten the
mood. But that, after all, is what really happened and represents the
true impact of mental illness.
