Hearts and Bones Review – Hugo Weaving brings characteristic pathos to restrained postwar drama

Hearts and Bones Review: When reviewers use the term subdued to describe their work, filmmakers like it because it suggests an academic rigor often missing in popular cinema’s unrealistic spectacles.

For the same purpose, audiences that are waiting for something more meaningful want it too. So, for what it’s worth, let me say this right off the bat: the Sydney-set drama Hearts and Bones by director Ben Lawrence, which revolves around the relationship between a war photographer and a refugee from South Sudan, is definitely constrained.

It is a human-oriented drama that provides a reflective and contemplative space, empathizing outside of the typical experience with characters coping with challenging circumstances.

It is also the type of drama that you want to snatch and shake to life at times. Get the lens a little dirty; knock the camera around a bit; add to the edit a sense of urgency; get the script (by Lawrence and Beatrix Christian) to draw bold conclusions with ambiguous ruminative answers to the ethical issues it poses rather than pussyfooting around.

Hearts and Bones: Let’s see more information:

Hearts and Bones’ tone, temperament, and rhythm are definitely consistent, but there is nothing especially rich or cinematic about it visually. In the director’s previous feature, Ghosthunter, an eerie documentary exploring a Sydney security guard who claims to chase ghosts in his spare time, Lawrence and his cinematographer Hugh Miller conjured up a more intriguing and much moodier look.

Similarly, Ghosthunter discusses topics of long-standing suffering and the failure of all of us to escape from our experience. Both of Lawrence’s films ruminate on one of the best lines spoken so far by the protagonist of the 2009 family film Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs You can’t run away from your own foot in the 21st-century cinema, spoken by, of all people.

It took deep thinking to come up with a line like that and to distill those deep emotions into too few terms with terrific quality. Hearts and Bones also make profound observations, but this is definitely not a work of narrative economy.

It has an ambiguous, lasting nature, dramatically, often meditative (another critic-deployed term film-makers seem to like) and often a little inert. On the plus hand, the performances are very effective and provide plenty of breathing room. The mood is calculated and, indeed, contemplative and restrained.