Review at Sundance 2012 of Wish You Were Here, starring Joel Edgerton.
Joel Edgerton stands out in edgy thriller Wish You Were Here.
Australian actor Kieran Darcy-Smith is fearless with his feature, directing debut Wish You Were Here; an edgy mystery about a man's disappearance that unfolds via frequent flashbacks, multiple points of view and artistic choices that challenge the audience. Making its premiere in the World Dramatic Competition section of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, Wish You Were Here skips a beat or two before revealing all its mysteries. Darcy-Smith and his co-writer, wife and actress, Felicity Price put one too many twists in the storytelling but that comes with risk-taking - and risk-taking is a rare commodity in moviemaking today.
A trip to Cambodia turns traumatic for Alice (Price) and her husband Dave (Joel Edgerton) when they join Alice's younger sister Steph (Teresa Palmer) and her boyfriend Jeremy (Antony Starr) on a spur-of- the-moment vacation to Cambodia.
Everything unravels when Dave gets drunk at a dive bar in a dangerous part of Cambodia and a series of bad decisions and "crazy drunk" actions rip his family apart.
Joel Edgerton is wonderfully naturalistic as Dave, a blue-collar dad envious of Steph’s carefree life and the money thrown around by Steph's boyfriend. Edgerton makes Dave, believably complex and completely relatable and the result is a performance far more complex than his turn in last fall's Warrior.
Teresa Palmer is pretty and carefree as Steph and makes a compelling catalyst for Dave's misguided decisions.
Playwright and actress Felicity Price stands out at as the most moral character in the movie and her emotional performance and emotional writing keeps Wish You Were Here from dissolving into a variation of The Hangover Part II.
Darcy-Smith, a founding member along with Edgerton of Blue-Tongue Films, an Australian collective of writers and directors, makes great use of cinematographer Jules O'Loughlin’s handheld camerawork and natural lighting as well the Cambodian backdrop.
In the film's early scenes of vacation happiness, Darcy-Smith uses vibrant color and music to show a family that’s happy and alive. It makes their fast breakdown all the more powerful by the scene where Dave staggers across a smoking wasteland trying to return to his room.
Darcy-Smith and Price challenge their audiences a little too much with Wish You Were Here as if they wanted to try out every narrative device with their first feature. Still, it’s hard to fault a filmmaker and scriptwriter for treating audiences too intelligently and pushing their own artistic boundaries.
Finally, just when Wish You Were Here looks to derail, Edgerton’s grounded performance helps make the storytelling right again. Edgerton delivers exactly what a twisting movie like Wish You Were Here needs: an average Joe character that relates to everybody.
Director: Kieran Darcy-Smith
Screenwriter: Kieran Darcy-Smith, Felicity Price
Cast: Joel Edgerton, Teresa Palmer, Antony Starr, Felicity Price
Distributor: Available
Producers: Blue-Tongue Films, Aquarius Films, Hopscotch, LevelK, Media Super
Cinematographer: Jules O'Loughlin
Editor: Jason Ballantine
Music: Rosie Chase