The New York Observer

Winslet Joins
Keitel in Campion Sequel

October 1999

Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke, from a screenplay by Anna Campion and Jane Campion, treads a fine line between mordant irony and mere facetiousness as it hops back and forth between Australia and India in a guru-driven sensual quest for faith and fraud. Ms. Campion is a wild talent even by Australia’s wild standards, which is to say that Holy Smoke is by turns witty, messy, perceptive, outrageous, incoherent, satirical, bombastic, cruel, lecherous, compassionate, violent, reflective and terminally unstable from one shot to the next. If it is held together at all, and I am not sure that it is, it is by the grace of Kate Winslet’s extraordinary and unparalleled range as an actress in what passes as the modern cinema in all its post-censorship sensations.

Ms. Winslet’s Ruth is a young Australian woman bewitched by the scents and certitudes of vaguely Eastern religions. Tricked by her parents into returning home from lightly spoofed India to heavily spoofed suburban Australia, Ruth finds herself delivered from one middle-aged guru in Hindu ceremonial costume to another middle-aged guru hired from America to reprogram her back into the tedium of suburban puttering and piety. Harvey Keitel’s P.J. Waters is summoned by Ruth’s family as a high-powered "spiritual" expert with a reputation for making his cult-possessed subjects use their own minds to free themselves from their obsessions.

Mr. Keitel, now in his late 50’s, is six years older than he was when he produced a priapic furor with his primitively matter-of-fact frontal male nudity in Ms. Campion’s award-winning The Piano (1993). At that time, his female co-star Holly Hunter was in her mid-30’s and no special attention was paid to the age differential. In Holy Smoke, however, Mr. Keitel’s P.J. Waters is tormented and humiliated by Ms. Winslet’s much younger Ruth for his dirty-old-man presumption. This is the crux of the drama and the heart of the matter: By finally discovering her sexual power as a woman along with its destructive potentialities, Ruth discovers also the warm maternal side of her nature that enables her to take pity on her pathetically obsessed lover.

In fairness to Mr. Keitel’s talents as a performer, it must be conceded that he is too much of a known quantity to surprise us anymore with his brand of hard-edged Actors Studio sensitivity. Ms. Winslet, however, continues to amaze with the sheer variety of her changes in accents, expressions and physical postures, from her homicidal nymphet debut in 1994 in Heavenly Creatures (1994) through Sense and Sensibility (1995) and Jude (1996), as well as her both overshadowed and underrated performances in the more recent Titanic (1997) and Hideous Kinky (1998).

Without Ms. Winslet to lend dignity, stature and complexity to the flaky, bratty, snotty role of Ruth, Holy Smoke would have floated away in the froth of broadly caricatured Australian and Indian gargoyles. Ms. Campion’s direction of actors and her depiction of social types have always mixed large doses of ridiculousness into the Australian absurdist stew, often seemingly in a bid for easy laughs and impolite shocks. Fortunately, Ms. Winslet’s Ruth is a fluid enough collaborative creation to blend into her crudely dysfunctional family without losing her individual qualities that enable her in the end to find her way in an adult manner. Among the other players, Julie Hamilton as Mum, Tim Robertson as Dad and Pam Grier in the cameo role of Carol—the stateside squeeze of Mr. Keitel’s P.J. Waters—have moments of escape into their private interiors from the constrictions of their sociologically programmed images.

I find it increasingly bizarre for people to complain that there are no parts for women when I seem to discover on the contrary every week that this may indeed be the golden age for actresses, though perhaps not at the kiddie-action-driven movie marketplace. Ms. Winslet is, by contrast, champagne and caviar for moviegoing grown-ups with good taste.