Jane Campion's The Piano (1993; 121 mins.)

PRINCIPAL CAST
actor	role
Holly Hunter	Ada McGrath
Sam Neill	Alisdair Stewart
Harvey Keitel	George Baines
Anna Paquin	Flora McGrath
Kerry Walker	Aunt Morag
Geneviève Lemon	Nessie
Tuniga Baker	Hira
Ian Mune	Reverend
Peter Dennett	Head Seaman

 

PRODUCTION CREDITS
Producer	Jan Chapman
Director	Jane Campion
Screenwriter	Jane Campion
Cinematographer	Stuary Dryburgh
Editor	Veronica Genet
Composer	Michael Nyman
Production Designer	Andrew McAlpine
Costumes	Janet Patterson

Director

Jane Campion was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1954; both her father, an opera and theater director, and her mother, an actor and writer, were second-generation New Zealanders. She graduated from Victoria University in Wellington with a degree in anthropology. After traveling in England and Europe, she studied at the Sydney College of the Arts in Australia, where she earned a degree in painting. She then began studies at the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School, where she made several award-winning short films about women before graduating in 1984. Her feature-length films have been primarily about women: Sweetie (1989), An Angel at My Table (1990), The Piano (1993),[1] The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Holy Smoke (1999), and In the Cut (2003). She is only the second woman (after Lina Wertmüller for Seven Beauties [Pasqualino settebellezze], 1976) to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Director.

music

Michael Nyman, the composer of the score for The Piano, has written for many films, including Peter Greenaway's The Draghtsman's Contract (1982), The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989), and Prospero's Books (1991), as well as Michael Winterbottom's The Claim (2000). For The Piano, he drew inspiration from several sources: Maori songs, nineteenth-century piano music, and traditional British ballads such as "Barbara Allen." The latter is a plaintive song about the obsessive love between a dying man and Barbara Allen, who rejects him; they are reconciled only in death: "An' 'twas there they tied a lover's knot, / The red rose and the briar." Within a sequence of actions, Campion uses this ballad to suggest that the affair between Baines and Ada is doomed. However, although they may seem incompatible as the red rose and the briar, they will be reunited after Ada's symbolic death by drowning.

The piano music that Nyman wrote for Ada recalls the romantic nocturnes of Chopin with their powerful harmonics and subtle rhythms, as well as New Age music and the piano improvisations of Keith Jarrett. As the name nocturne implies, this is music for the night. In the hands of Holly Hunter, these piano pieces—dark, hypnotic, and dominated by chords—express Ada's romantic longings and erotic passions until that time comes when she learns to act on them.

historical background

As a native New Zealander, as well as a trained anthropologist, Jane Campion was very familiar with her country's history and its terrain, having explored it thoroughly, as well as its indigenous Maori culture. The Piano is set in New Zealand, a country that consists of two large islands—North Island, where the film was shot, and South Island—approximately twelve hundred miles southeast of the tip of Australia. Beginning in the thirteenth century, New Zealand was inhabited largely by the Maori, a Polynesian people who migrated from neighboring Pacific Ocean islands. In 1769, New Zealand was claimed by the British; seventy-five years later, the Maori signed a treaty with the United Kingdom, which received sovereignty over the islands but agreed to respect the natives' ownership rights. A year later, New Zealand became a separate crown colony, with Auckland as its first capital. Soon fierce disputes between the new settlers and the Maori erupted over land claims and led to violent Maori uprisings during 1845–48 and 1860–72. Significant numbers of European immigrants arrived in the 1850s, and the influx was spurred by the discovery of gold around 1860. Gold mining and sheep raising were the main sources of the country's wealth in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

narrative

Story

Ada McGrath, a single Scotswoman living in Glasgow with her daughter, Flora, marries by proxy a New Zealand settler, Alisdair Stewart, and travels by ship to the other side of the world to join him. She takes Flora and sufficient possessions to establish a new household, the most important of these being her piano. Because she has been mute since the age of six, Ada communicates through her music, written notes, sign language, and Flora, who serves as interpreter. Her life in New Zealand with Stewart seems doomed from the beginning to be unhappy. Stewart is not mute, so he did not choose Ada to be his partner in silence; instead, according to her, he chose her because "God loves dumb creatures, so why not he!" For reasons not altogether clear, but obviously related to his asserting his patriarchal role, Stewart refuses to transport her piano to his farm, thus robbing her of her greatest pleasure. George Baines, a neighboring settler, buys the piano from Stewart, transports it to his house, and bargains with Ada that he will eventually return it if she gives him piano lessons.

Baines uses the piano lessons as a pretext for seducing Ada, and when he has achieved his goal, he releases her from the bargain and returns the piano to her. In the meantime, Stewart discovers the affair. Although Ada and Stewart have not consummated their marriage, Ada, awakened sexually, becomes tender with her husband. But when he spies on Ada and Baines having sex, he goes mad and attempts to rape her. Trapped in her skirts, the mud, and the surrounding vines, she physically resists him but ultimately stops him with her stare, her most powerful means of communication. When Stewart discovers that Baines cannot give up his wife, he chops off one of Ada's fingers as a warning to her. She recovers and abandons him for Baines; they leave the remote backcountry for the city, where she learns again to speak and, with her mutilated finger replaced by a metal one, plays the piano again.

The story is simple, but its tone is deeply romantic and passionate. We might even call it a fairy tale. It works on many levels, but it is above all a story of the human mind, body, soul, and spirit; of passion, love, and pride; of repression, jealousy, revenge, and rebirth; of the fulfillment of a woman's "will" (a word Ada uses several times in the film). The plot structure is a symbolic journey from one place to another, and Campion signals each stage with unforgettable images of a boat, seen from underwater: the first depicts the journey from Scotland to the settlement in New Zealand; the second depicts the journey from this settlement to the nearby city of Nelson. The story also represents Ada's journey from loneliness and silence to a relationship with George Baines and speech. Before that final step, she must (to paraphrase Joseph Conrad's remark in his 1900 novel Lord Jim) immerse herself in the destructive element, the silence of the sea in which she will be reborn. After she is safely back in the boat, she says: "What a death! What a chance! What a surprise! My will has chosen life! Still it has had me spooked and many others besides! I teach piano now in Nelson. George has fashioned me a metal fingertip, I am quite the town freak which satisfies! I am learning to speak. My sound is still so bad I am ashamed. I practice only when I am alone and it is dark." The order of her words is prophetic—death, chance, surprise, life—the "death" of her piano leads to the "chance" (or "fate") that pulls her overboard, which leads to the "surprise" of her desire to live, and the fact of "life." But as the rest of the passage shows, she now has a sense of humor and is "satisfie[d]" to be known, because of her metal fingertip, as the "town freak."

Yet Ada's solitary determination remains. Wearing a scarf over her head, alone and in the dark, she's learning to speak, as she tells us in a voiceover on the sound track. Nonetheless, the enigma of silence not only begins the film but also ends it, with the lines quoted from the beginning of "Silence," a poem by Thomas Hood (1799–1845):

There is a silence where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be,
In the cold grave-under the deep, deep sea,
[Or in wide desert where no life is found. (omitted from the film's narration)]

Campion has given us a silent ending, not a predictable or even happy one.

Themes

Overlaying the film is the theme of civilization versus nature, focusing specifically on what the supposedly civilized white European settlers, who arrived in the late eighteenth century, did to the land inhabited by the native Maori. Just below the surface are the interwoven ideas of male dominance and colonialism. Male dominance begins with Ada's father's arranging her marriage. The women in the small settlement are treated as commodities, much as the natives are.

Art plays a role in both the settlers' and Maori societies. Art is the imaginary world we make to save us from the real world. Ada has her piano; Flora, her toys; the settlers, their theater; the Maori, their carvings. The opposite of art is destruction, represented most clearly in Stewart's plundering of the land. Ada, initially the artist existing only for her art—we first see her smile when she plays her piano on the beach while Flora dances and turns cartwheels—ironically must reject her music to become the woman she wants to be.

Closely related to these themes are ideas of sexuality and sexual initiation. Baines makes music his pretense to seduction. Ada pretends to be a proper Victorian woman, but she longs for sexual reawakening and yields easily and willingly to Baines. In addition, without developing the idea, Campion introduces a homosexual into the Maori community. Athough contemporary Maori told Campion that their ancestors would have killed a homosexual, she wanted to contrast, however anachronistically, the natives' open sexuality with the settlers' prudishness. Native women wore sarongs, for example, whereas female settlers dressed in bonnets, hoopskirts, corsets, and knee boots.

Indeed, The Piano functions dialectically, through contrasts. The settlers are progressive; the Maori, conservative. The settlers lived in families, dominated by women; the Maori lived in a patriarchal society, led by an elder. The settlers worshiped one God; the Maori believed in many gods and spirits. The settlers care for land only insofar as it yields riches or produces crops; the Maori revere the burial grounds of their ancestors. The settlers have little sense of humor; the Maori see the humor in everything. When a murder is about to occur in a pageant based loosely on the fairy tale of Bluebeard, the wife killer, Maori men in the audience are so upset that they stop the show. According to the movie, they, not the "civilized" Scots, have the "correct" values.

Ultimately, Campion's Romantic treatment of nineteenth-century period detail contrasts with her story's modern psychological "realism." While the political and cultural history of New Zealand is relevant to the story, Campion is more interested in the relationship between her characters and the landscape. In fact, she revised the script twice to emphasize the lyrical and psychological over the cultural aspects of the story. In telling the story, Campion takes two different approaches: that of the anthropologist, who sees history as fact, artifact, and patterns; and that of the artist, who sees history as epic, spectacle, and images. On one hand, the film displays the influence of German expressionism in its evocation of the physical atmosphere and culture of the community, its oppressive sense of fate, and its obsessive association of sensuality with evil; on the other hand, it recalls the Puritan strain of American melodrama with the island community's focus on domestic life, small-minded concern with adultery, and nervous apprehension about art.

Mise-En-ScÈne, Design, and Cinematography

Composition and Cinematography

Nineteenth-century Romanticism influences not only the music but also the look of the film, particularly its depiction of the sea and the landscape. Here is Campion describing the wild areas of New Zealand:

There is such an intensity in certain parts of the bush that you have the impression of being under water. It's a landscape that is unsettling, claustrophobic and mythic all at the same time. . . . I wanted to create a feeling of terror in the spectator when faced with the power of natural elements. That's, I think, the essence of Romanticism: this respect for a nature that is considered larger than you, your mind, or even humanity.[2]

Although many of the images create this feeling, Campion expected the cinematography to emphasize character rather than scenery and to use visual language that was slightly different from the epic cinema of directors such as David Lean. Her goal was to "photograph a story that has epic qualities . . . to still have my identity but also have a feminine epic quality and to recreate it so that the epicness didn't feel like it relates back to other big-look movies" (122). The look of the film, so magnificently achieved by the cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh, conveys the visual effects achieved by the first color film, Autochrome, invented by the Lumière brothers and patented in 1906. This color film stock is no longer available, having been supplanted by faster and more reliable stocks, but it was capable of producing both wide tonal gradations—dark by present-day standards but delicate, often of a soft pastel nature—and the otherworldliness, the underwater quality, that characterizes so much of the hypnotic cinematography in The Piano.

Dryburgh's cinematographic plan creates three kinds of space. The first two—the vast ocean and the claustrophobic jungle—are natural; the third is subjective, representing things that are only partially seen by the characters and the camera. To create this subjective space, he alternates two points of view. The first is the omniscient POV, as in the gorgeous, wide-angle, widescreen images of the sea just after Ada and Flora arrive on the island, or the subsequent shot from a helicopter flying low over the jungle treetops. After their arrival, the screen shifts from the widescreen format to normal ratio (depending on the version you see), visually emphasizing the transition from the world-as-a-whole to the isolated and claustrophobic world of the island. In fact, this transition may also be from an objective to a subjective world. Both of Stewart's most violent acts—attempting to rape Ada and mutilating her hand—occur in surreal jungle scenes that represent his POV and state of mind. Stewart tells Baines he believes everything that has happened since he discovered his wife's infidelity is a dream. At that moment, the landscape is almost totally drained of color. He also tells George he has "heard" Ada speak, saying that she wants to go away with Baines. We have seen her sleepwalking, so she might also have spoken in her sleep, but this seems more likely to have been a part of Stewart's dream than an actual experience.

The second way that the film creates subjective space is through the restricted POV, a motif established in the film's opening images shot from Ada's POV looking out between her fingers. This POV continues throughout the film, with the camera and the characters peeking through cracks and holes, seeing closely but also partially. At the opening, Flora is sheltered inside her mother's hoopskirt, looking out; the wedding photographer peers through the viewfinder; the little actresses in the pageant peek through the holes in the curtain. When Baines begins to seduce Ada from under the piano, his first sight of her body is hampered by her crinoline hoopskirt, and when he does get a glimpse of her leg, it is through a hole in her stocking. Both Flora and Stewart look through the cracks of Baines's cabin to see Ada and Baines in bed.

Of these special viewpoints, critic Richard Corliss writes that The Piano

burrows into two essential obsessions of the oldest films: emotion conveyed without words, and the image of a man watching a woman. . . . The camera ascends to Campion's favorite bird's-eye view to reveal a huge sea horse magically sculpted from sand and shells. Life, this beautiful image suggests, is a pattern we cannot see, except through the artist's Olympian eye.[3]

Campion deliberately alternates these various points of view—the omniscient eye of the camera and the private observation of the characters—to create a world that is both real and imaginary.

Production Design

The Piano clearly exemplifies how the details of production design help tell the story: the long, rolling rhythm of the waves, the sunlight on them, the sense that the tide might rise and wash everything away; the boards that are needed to cross the mud; and the vines in the jungle (or "bush," as it is called in New Zealand). In fact, a central motif in the film is the imagery of vines, nets, traps, and ropes, whether natural or human-made, that must be transcended if Ada is to escape what seems a foredoomed existence. Like the characters, we see as though caught within this imagery looking out, or outside the imagery looking in. Ada looks out from the trap of her fingers. Similarly, our vision is restricted. We don't see Ada's father's house, only the housemaid, an interior corridor, and a bedroom. Likewise, we never see what is inside the boxes that Ada takes on her journey, but we do see her playing the piano (through the slats of the packing crate) before she begins the journey and soon after she arrives on the beach. Snaking vines add to the menacing look of the muddy landscape, threatening to trap the characters if the mud doesn't. Adultery is hidden behind walls with holes in them. Adulterous wives are locked in rooms, barred from escape.

The most important symbolic details in the film are the piano and the fingers that play it. In the opening shots, Ada's ring finger strokes Flora's face; Stewart brutally severs her finger, which then serves as a new kind of "bargain" defining the triangular relationship of Stewart, Baines, and Ada; in the closing shots, we see Ada's finger with its silver tip as she acknowledges, on the sound track, that she's become "quite the town freak" and that it suits her. When Ada cannot have her piano, she marks the outlines of the keyboard on the kitchen table and blithely accompanies Flora's singing, prompting the ever-literal Aunt Morag to ask Stewart if it's possible to "play a kitchen table." Just as moving the piano to the farm was Ada's first "test" after arriving on the island, so getting rid of it is her final test on leaving it. When her piano is pushed overboard, the rope that is attached to it uncoils naturally. This is a brilliant detail. Does Ada, as we've suggested, step willingly into its deadly trap? Or is it just an accident? We don't have time to think, for once Ada is underwater, her will to live reasserts itself and she frees her leg and rises from the silence of the sea to the surface, from death to life. Ironically, she must sacrifice the piano, which has been her "voice," to save herself. She deserves the unfettered voice that comes when a person achieves freedom and equality.

CHARACTERS

The characters are not drawn from life; they work solely in service of the story. Campion tells us what she wants us to know at each moment, keeping us guessing about everything we see and hear. But we soon learn not to trust what we see and hear, especially what the characters tell us about one another. Flora tells a fanciful tale about her father's identity, but Ada explains that he was a teacher. He so understood what she was thinking that she "could lay thoughts out in his mind like they were a sheet," but eventually her muteness frightened him away. What was he really like? Was he really her husband? In fact, was he real? Similarly, Baines tells the Maori women that he left his "wife" in England. Should we believe him? Is this "fact" important?

Ada McGrath

Ada is the first person we see, and the film opens with her narration on the sound track:

The voice you hear is not my speaking voice, but my mind's voice. I have not spoken since I was six years old. No one knows why, not even me. My father says it is a dark talent and the day I take it into my head to stop breathing will be my last. The strange thing is I don't think myself silent, that is, because of my piano. I shall miss it on the journey.

Beyond this, we know nothing of her background except that her father saw Stewart's advertisement for a wife—a means of accomplishing a marriage that was common in the nineteenth century—and arranged their wedding.

Campion says that after seeing a film Roman Polanski made as a student, Two Men and a Wardrobe (Dwaj ludzie z szafa, 1958), she too wanted to tell a story that centered around an object, specifically a piano. As for making Ada mute, she wanted the piano to mean much more to Ada than it would have to a speaking person; thus the piano reflected her soul and became her way of communicating.

We might see Ada as the textbook definition of a Romantic about: idealistic, rebellious, secretive, stubborn, and so obsessed with her art that she is willing to die for it. As Campion puts it, "Ada is such a perfectionist that when her piano is hit with an axe, or has lost a key, it is rendered an imperfect object" (116). Perhaps the most revealing evidence of her fierce independence is that she keeps her own name and is never referred to as Mrs. Stewart. By the end of the film, Ada will have learned that she cannot control nature, people, music, or herself; she will have learned to compromise, to love, and thus to transfer her obsession from an inanimate object to a person.

Flora McGrath

Flora is an unusually strong character for a child, and yet she is so intelligent, resourceful, independent, and possessed of such a powerful presence that we instinctively regard her as believable. Campion suggests she is an illegitimate child, and thus Ada and Flora have neither husband nor father, only themselves. Their bond is touching but repressive, for it gives Flora even more power over her mother than just her function as interpreter would represent. In that sense, she reminds us of Hester Prynne's beautifully dressed little "spirit child" in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter (1850). Stewart is so overwhelmed by the physical and emotional intensity of the mother-daughter relationship that he neither understands it nor is capable of parting them so he can begin to build his marriage with Ada. Yet even though Flora vows at the beginning of the film, "I'm not going to call him Papa. I'm not going to call HIM anything. I'm not even going to look at HIM," she begins to call him "Papa" when she senses she's losing her mother to Baines.

Without any explanation in the film about how she came to be this way, she is a worldly child, far more worldly than her age. Flora loves her mother deeply and delights in being her interpreter. She is resourceful—who else would have thought to use a hoopskirt for a tent?—and creative, capable of sculpting a huge sea horse out of sand and shells. She goes along with Ada to the piano lessons, but when she peeks inside and learns the truth about what is going on, she is disturbed but silent. However, she does not remain silent long, for one day when Stewart asks her where her mother has gone, she shouts, "To hell!"[4]

Alisdair Stewart

Stewart immigrated from Scotland—perhaps, like Ada and Flora, from Glasgow. Made claustrophobic by the jungle, he is determined to transform it, either by burning back its forests so that he can plant crops or by bribing the natives with buttons, blankets, and guns to win their approval for his expansion onto their sacred burial ground. Campion describes him as "a decent if repressed man who probably never had sex in his life" (148). The Maori call him "old dry balls." When Aunt Morag, a busybody, learns that Ada and he have not yet consummated their marriage, she counsels patience. Later, his impotence becomes apparent when Ada tenderly caresses his naked body and he stops her, saying he wished he knew how to touch her . Still later, after he has chopped off her finger, Stewart does more than try to touch Ada while she is recuperating in bed, an ugly scene that shows not only his inexperience but also his crudeness.

George Baines

The Piano sets male and female characters, each of whom is distinctly different from the others, in opposition to one another. If these relationships were represented on the balance arm of a scale, on one end would be Alisdair Stewart, a repressed, sexually innocent Anglo-Saxon who chooses a "mail-order bride" rather than a local woman and expects nature to take its course as far as their sexual relationship is concerned. The balance of the scale would be occupied by Ada, who willingly participates in her sexual reawakening. At the other end would be George Baines, who in contrast to Stewart and the other settlers is both lower class and a loner. He resembles the others, however, in that we do not know where he came from—perhaps he was a shipwrecked whaler who settled in New Zealand? The partial Maori tattoo on his nose indicates that that he is not fully part of Maori culture, that he has somehow stopped himself, or been prevented by others, from assimilation. Although Baines says he cannot read, he has learned to speak the Maori language, which makes him valuable as an interpreter between them and the settlers. Thus both Baines and Ada are defined by their language or lack of it.

Casting and Transformation into Character

Campion wrote the screenplay before thinking of the actors who would play the roles, and casting the film became a major effort involving three casting directors on different continents. The four principal actors come from different backgrounds: Holly Hunter and Harvey Keitel were born in the United States, Sam Neill was born in Northern Ireland and raised in New Zealand, and Anna Paquin comes from New Zealand. Although Hunter, Keitel, and Neill had different training as actors, and each had played roles quite unlike those required in this movie, they all drew on experience and talent to transform themselves for their portrayals. By contrast, eleven-year-old Paquin was appearing in her first film; she apparently was born to be in the movies, for she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

In her dual role as screenwriter and director, Campion closely supervised the casting, explaining that her goal, typical of most directors in this position, was to "protect" her story by choosing actors who would serve it. When Holly Hunter learned of the role of Ada McGrath, she was determined to get it, even sending Campion a tape recording of her piano playing. The gesture touched Campion, but Hunter was the complete opposite of her image of Ada. What finally convinced her was Hunter's eyes:

[I]t struck me even more powerfully that, for someone who was not going to be speaking, the eyes were going to be such an important element. Holly has these dark-brown, burning eyes and an intense gaze. I found in her eyes something you could hold onto. You could be with her, identify closely with her, you could trust her. They are very eloquent eyes. (118; emphasis added)

Holly Hunter

Holly Hunter was born in 1958 in Georgia, studied drama at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and works regularly in theater, television, and movies. Her most prominent movie roles have been in Joel Coen's Raising Arizona (1987), James L. Brooks's Broadcast News (1987; Oscar nomination for Best Actress), Sydney Pollack's The Firm (1993; Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress), Jane Campion's The Piano (1993; Oscar for Best Actress; Best Actress awards from the Australian Film Institute, Boston Society of Film Critics, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, Cannes Film Festival, Chicago Film Critics Association, Golden Globe Awards, London Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, National Board of Review, National Society of Film Critics, New York Film Critics Circle, and the Southeastern Film Critics Association), Jon Amiel's Copycat (1995), David Cronenberg's Crash (1996), Danny Boyle's A Life Less Ordinary (1997), Alison Maclean's Jesus' Son (1999), Kiefer Sutherland's Woman Wanted (1999), Mike Figgis's Timecode (2000), and Joel Coen's O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). For her work in television, she has received many Emmy Awards and nominations as Best Actress.

When we consider Hunter's career before The Piano, we can easily understand why Campion had some reservations about her. After all, Hunter had established herself as an actor who played energetic, talky, sometimes abrasive southern eccentrics. But Hunter seems to have had no reservations about broadening her scope with a role such as this. Consider the many challenges. When she wasn't fully nude, she was required to wear corsets, hoopskirts, and a slicked-down hairstyle. Moreover, she had to learn sign language and to speak only in voiceovers on the sound track. For these brief moments, she (as well as Keitel and Neill) perfected a Glaswegian accent. The young Lillian Gish, perhaps the greatest of silent screen actors, would have played the part perfectly; Hunter created her own version of the beleaguered silent film heroine who is secretly stronger than appearances suggest. For this film, Holly Hunter reinvented silent acting, gently teaching audiences who had little or no experience with silent actors how to look at, interpret, and appreciate what she was doing on the screen. Through her eyes, gestures, and overall manner, she created the severe and seemingly prudish look of a nineteenth-century woman repressed in everything except her own silent pride. She not only expanded her repertoire but won an Oscar for her stunning performance.

Harvey Keitel

Campion worried that she might have difficulty in directing Keitel, whose experience was mostly in tough-guy roles. When she discussed this with him, he replied, "All actors are very scared, very anxious. All we want to really do is please the director. So why don't we do this: you allow me to do a thing the way I want to do it first of all, and then I'll promise you I will try anything you ask me" (120). Keitel, who studied at the Actors Studio, began his career with Martin Scorsese, eventually appearing in six of his films: Who's That Knocking at My Door? (1968), Street Scenes (1970), Mean Streets (1973), Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1975), Taxi Driver (1976), and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Among the other noteworthy films in his vast filmography are Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976), Alan Rudolph's Welcome to L.A. (1977) and Mortal Thoughts (1991), Ridley Scott's The Duellists (1977) and Thelma and Louise (1991) , Bertrand Tavernier's Deathwatch (La mort en direct, 1980), Nicolas Roeg's Bad Timing (1980), Tony Richardson's The Border (1982), Lina Wertmüller's A Complex Plot about Women, Alleys, and Crimes (Un complicato intrigo di donne, vicoli e delitti, 1986), Dario Argento's Two Evil Eyes (Duo occhi diabolici, 1990), Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant (1992), Wayne Wang's Smoke (1995), Spike Lee's Clockers (1995), James Mangold's Cop Land (1997), and Jane Campion's Holy Smoke (1999).

Keitel's genius in The Piano is playing against the tense tough-guy type that we have come to expect and taking risks in a part that demands that he must be sensitive and sexually unsophisticated. The strength and sweetness here, also seen in his performance in Smoke, are endearing, particularly in contrast to Sam Neill's portrayal of Alisdair Stewart. This transformation as an actor—as well as his transformation as a character who goes from timid loner to passionate lover—is thoroughly convincing.

Sam Neill

Like Keitel, Sam Neill is known for edgy and intense portrayals in a variety of roles. He began his career with acclaimed performances in three films by Australian directors: Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career (1979) and Fred Schepisi's Plenty (1985) and A Cry in the Dark (1988). He has also directed documentaries and appeared frequently on television. Among his many films are John McTiernan's The Hunt for Red October (1990), Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993), various Australian films including John Duigan's Sirens (1994) and Peter Duncan's Children of the Revolution (1996), Michael Hoffman's Restoration (1995), Robert Redford's The Horse Whisperer (1998), Chris Columbus's Bicentennial Man (1999), and Joe Johnston's Jurassic Park III (2001).

In The Piano, as Keitel plays against expectations, Neill wraps himself in them. His Alisdair Stewart is very much part of the movie's dark mood. He is, as critic Anthony Lane writes, "a true Victorian, toiling away at the extremes of empire yet loath to explore the chambers of his own heart."[5] We come to accept him as unsympathetic, cold, and neurotic, exuding a brooding menace that explodes in an act of violence.

Anna Paquin

Paquin's performance as Flora is astonishing. At times, she seems to want to do more than the role calls for. Campion acknowledged this tension: "The young girl was so good during the shooting, she was a young actress so unusually strong, that we were effectively a bit afraid that sometimes her character had too much force in relation to the other actors. But at the end, it's the story that resolves this problem" (128).

 

Holly Hunter's Performance

The Piano suggests itself as a case study for acting because it is a period piece in which the lead actor plays a woman who does not speak. As we learn from the opening moment, she can speak, but for reasons never explained she chooses to communicate only through sign language, gesture, written notes, and the music she plays on her piano—and, to the audience, through occasional voiceover narration that is sometimes accompanied by subtitles. Thus this role challenges the actor as does no other in recent memory. Ada is a realistic and believable character living in a dark and seemingly doomed world, and Hunter gives a naturalistic performance.

We have already examined the character as created by screenwriter-director Jane Campion, the overall context (historical, psychological, cultural) from which she emerged, and the many challenges Hunter faced in representing her on the screen. Hunter takes Ada's traits—her single-mindedness, perfectionism, obsessions, and desire for independenceand unifies them into a coherent and believable character. Her chalk-white face, pensive expression, confining hairstyle, and dark dresses, while they wonderfully replicate the appearance of certain nineteenth-century women, in effect erase her from view and lead us to concentrate on her face, especially her eyes. Even when Stewart looks at the daguerreotype she has sent him, her eyes seem the most prominent feature of the image.

One of the clichés of film acting is that we should be able to "see the actors think," but that actually happens here: Ada's face reveals her psychology so clearly that all her motivations and behavior are there for us to read. While we may not know anyone like Ada, we feel as if we do because she is eminently recognizable as a human being. Depending on the situation and her moods, Ada's face displays coldness, serenity, or warmth. For example, when she steps off the boat, her face shows no feeling whatsoever; but soon, when she looks down at her piano on the beach, her face becomes serene (and we hear her serene musical theme for the first time). She seems to be remembering something, and because we empathize with her, we go beyond simply guessing at what she thinks and understanding what she does; instead of reading her face, we write on it our hopes for her future. Hunter always gives us enough time to do this, to think along with her and to interpret those thoughts in her actions. Soon after the confusion with the wedding photograph, Stewart must leave on a trip related to his farming, so he suggests that they can "start again" when he returns. Her face registers only the very slightest suggestion of agreement, but it seems to satisfy him.

Intensity is the most distinctive single element in Holly Hunter's portrayal of Ada's actions, thoughts, and internal complexities: intensity in her determination to reclaim and play her piano, intensity in resisting and then yielding to Baines's seduction, intensity in thwarting Stewart's opposition. We see this in the rigid way she holds her posture and accepts and copes with clothing that, given the circumstances, appears ridiculous to us. Often, Ada's face is a mask, in the sense that it does not register expression, but she never conceals what she feels because Hunter so consistently controls her body language, gestures, and facial expressions that we are kept within Ada's world until she decides to get out of it herself. As for her eyes, they are so small, so black, and sometimes so focused that she seems about to go cross-eyed. Look carefully at her eyes in the scene in which she orders her piano to be thrown overboard. You might need to screen out every other element because the whole scene is so gripping, but in the process you will understand how her eyes speak for her, how they are indeed "eloquent," as Campion said.

One special quality that Holly Hunter brought to the role was her desire to create a character who is totally unlike anything she had ever played on the screen before. Another was her willingness to learn both a Glaswegian accent and sign language. Her own ability to play the piano sets her character's obsession with music apart from that of all the other film characters who are supposed to be playing the piano but who can't, forcing the camera to remain on their faces. Even much of the music she plays—endless chord repetitions—takes on a greater value because it seems to come straight from her soul through her fingers to the keys. That is because she is playing the music, not acting at playing it.

As a veteran film actor, Hunter clearly knows how to use the filmmaking process to her best advantage. She frequently looks straight into the camera, as if to implore the audience to understand what she is doing. For example, as Ada arrives in New Zealand and is helped off the boat by the crew, her look registers a sense of helplessness and dread. If that is her response to her future home, then that is what we feel, for her gaze implores our empathy. However dainty Ada may seem—Stewart calls her "stunted"—she is not at the mercy of anyone, and Hunter reveals Ada's inner strength slowly so that we are continually impressed by her willpower and ability to get what she wants. We know little about Ada's life before the story begins, details that are relevant to how Holly Hunter created the character's motivations. For purposes of discussion, let's say that Hunter believed Ada to have been deeply in love with a man who fathered her child but who, she learned, did not love her and was married. This would explain the close mother-daughter relationship and her wariness about her new husband. She must do what her father tells her to do, but she does not have to obey him once she is in New Zealand. Or perhaps Hunter thought that Ada was raped by an unknown assailant and that only Flora's love could redeem that horrible experience. Her traumatic memories would help explain her troubled sexuality as well as her feeling of independence when Stewart fails her first "test," refusing to move the piano to the farm. But conjecture aside, Hunter keeps us off guard as to Ada's motivations, both because Campion has written the character that way because she understands that Ada's mysterious nature is far more interesting than any straightforward factors that might conveniently explain the plot direction for us.

The Piano is a "chamber film": ensemble acting, carefully modulated by the director, is essential to developing its complex story and sustaining the believability of its characters and mood. As the lead actor, Hunter has the greatest responsibility not only in creating her own character but in helping to create an expressive coherence that unites all the performances. This logic seems to have been absolutely essential with a film as isolated in setting, claustrophobic in mood, and strange in plot development. For example, Ada is animated with Flora, but not with the others. Yet the more she yields to Baines, the more expressive her face becomes. When he appears naked and suggests that she also remove her clothes and lie with him, she seizes on the opportunity to turn the bargain to her side and, with sly wit and charm, holds up ten fingers, stipulating that it will cost him more than he thought for the privilege. When they have sex for the first time, they are awkward in discovering each other's body and prudish in concealing their nudity.

Many viewers do not understand or appreciate the small, precious world that Campion and her collaborators have created. Critic Stanley Kauffmann, for example, dismissed The Piano as "an overwrought, hollowly symbolic glob of glutinous nonsense."[6] Among other things, he overlooked the skill with which the actors use their expressive powers to integrate themselves into the world of Campion's story, however exotic it may seem, and make us forget they are acting.

FOR FURTHER READING

Klawans, Stuart. "The Piano." Nation 257, 6 December 1993, 704–6.

Margolis, Harriet Elaine, ed. Jane Campion's "The Piano." New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Polan, Dana B. Jane Campion. London: British Film Institute, 2001.

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[1] Campion shortened her original title, The Piano Lesson, in deference to the 1990 play of that title by American playwright August Wilson.

[2]Jane Campion, Jane Campion: Interviews, ed. Virginia Wright Wexman (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 107. Unless otherwise specified, all subsequent quotations and citations in this case study are from this book.

[3]Stanley Kauffmann, "A New Spielberg; And Others," New Republic, 13 December 1993, 30.

[4]The critic Vincent Canby declares that she delivers this judgmental line "with the wrath of an Old Testament prophet" ("The Piano," New York Times, 16 October 1993, 20).

[5] Anthony Lane, "Sheet Music," New Yorker, 29 November 1993, 149.

[6]Stanley Kauffmann, "A New Spielberg; And Others," New Republic, 13 December 1993, 30.