Ada McGrath is “difficult.”
Unmarried, with a child, and mute, Ada (Holly Hunter) is sent by her father to marry a Scottish colonist in 1850s New Zealand. She insists on taking her massive piano. The trip isn’t easy (Ada vomits upon arriving on the wild and windswept shore) and neither is she. When her new husband Alisdair (Sam Neill) is late coming to meet her, the captain offers to let her return to the ship. Speaking via sign language to her daughter, Flora (Anna Paquin), she essentially tells him to “f*** off!”
Welcome to the cinema—and, specifically, the masterpiece—of Jane Campion, where women who have been misread by society as “difficult” are revealed to be forceful, perceptive, damaged, ingenious, sexual, caring, angry, and resolute. In other words, human. And therefore difficult.
Gloomily gorgeous in sound and image, poetic in ways that are simple, yet also plumb unanswerable, watery depths, The Piano swirls in melodrama and metaphor. Consider the instrument of the title. Arriving with Ada and Flora, it enters the screen from behind and over the camera, lowering into our field of vision like a holy artifact. At first—left in its crate on the beach by Alisdair, who deems it too heavy to cart back to his homestead—the piano remains a mystery. But once Ada convinces a sympathetic neighbor, Baines (Harvey Keitel), to bring it up from the beach, it becomes a voracious symbol, swallowing whatever meaning you care to give to it. Most obviously it stands in for Ada’s voice, but it also comes to represent her past. Eventually, perhaps, it’s an image of depression (one of the indigenous Maori people refers to it as a “coffin”). The reading I tend to prefer—though the ending complicates this a bit—is that the piano symbolizes whatever it is that keeps us alive during our existential struggle to live.
Not that the instrument alone is called upon to do all of the emotional/psychological work. Topography is almost as important in the film, captured by Campion and cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh in mercurial blues, greens, and grays. From those roiling waves, which seem to have been belched onto the beach by the stormy skies, to the endless mud that oozes through exposed tree roots and hapless boardwalks, the landscape here is at once a mirror of Ada’s turbulent mind and a commentary on the foolishness of colonialism. (The costume design, dominated by obtrusive gowns and teetering top hats, also contributes to the latter.) And then there is the score, a Michael Nyman composition whose theme, based on the traditional Scottish melody “Gloomy Winter’s Noo Awa,” is supple enough to evoke joy, deep melancholy, and—in the film’s most tragic moment—bitter irony.
That moment comes far into the movie and also includes a shattering display of acting by Hunter. By this point, Baines—recognizing what the piano means to Ada—has traded acreage to Alisdair in exchange for the piano and lessons from Ada. (How much Alisdair understands that he is essentially trading his wife is one of the movie’s slippery questions.) Those lessons have become a murky power game between Baines and Ada, blossoming from exploitation to mutual passion. When their affair is thrust in Alisdair’s face (or, to be more accurate, he thrusts his eyeball between the wooden slats of Baines’ cottage), he punishes Ada by chopping one of her fingers off with an axe.
Watch Hunter’s face in the wake of the blow (there is so much subtlety at work that Campion has to downshift into slow motion to capture it). She registers the horrific physical pain, the psychological shock, and then something uncanny: a terrible zen. Calm passes over her visage, followed by a creeping defiance. In losing what has kept her alive, does she now know the awful freedom of no longer wanting to live? As she crumples into the mud, her dress billowing about her like an exhausted last gasp, we’re not sure. Even in this moment, Ada is difficult.
As Baines, Keitel brings shading and sophistication to an extremely tricky character. When Baines trades for the piano lessons, the ensuing bargain he strikes with Ada—exchanging a key for each visit, until she earns the piano back—is both manipulative and undeniably romantic. And, true to Campion, Ada eventually turns the tables and takes control of the bargain. Notice how her playing, at first lush and soft, turns hard and jaunty when Baines pushes her beyond her comfort level. When he eventually calls off the bargain and gives her the instrument back, it’s for a simple, swooning reason that Keitel offers with a startling vulnerability: “I want you to care for me.”
Baines begins as a violator (during an early lesson, he does kiss Ada’s neck without her consent), but becomes a genuine lover. In response, Alisdair assaults, not only with that axe, but in an earlier moment where he claws at a fleeing Ada among those muddy roots, like a rabid, fairy-tale wolf. Neill is a marvel, making Alisdair both villainous and pitiable, as is the very young Paquin. (She and Hunter both won Oscars, along with Campion for her original screenplay.) No comic-relief moppet, Flora is troublesome too; she’s inherited her mother’s scowl, but hasn’t learned the social graces of when to suppress it. Paquin makes this child difficult in ways that are also deeply human—and ultimately lead to tragedy for her mother.
It’s always something of a surprise to remember that The Piano doesn’t end in tragedy. Yet it doesn’t exactly conclude in comedy either. Yes, we learn that Ada, Flora, and Baines survive to share a caring life together (his grasping of her hand as she passes him, a cloth over her face, might be the movie’s most romantic gesture), but the final images return to the piano itself, left at the bottom of that tempestuous bay, a ghostly, imagined figure floating just above it. Campion is too fervent a creator of such potent imagery—and too keen an observer of the conflicted human experience—to leave us with anything remotely akin to a trite “happy ending.” That, after all, would be easy.
(10/6/2021)
