Oscar and Lucinda (1997)

Oscar and Lucinda
Dir. Gillian Armstrong.
Australian Film Finance Corp/Dalton Films/Fox Searchlight, 1997. Rated R.

“Oscar and Lucinda follows the unpredictable turns of two people from opposite ends of the world who come together in a story of faith, love, fate and chance. Oscar Hopkins (Ralph Fiennes) is a flame haired minister who thinks like an angel and gambles like the devil. Lucinda Leplastrier (Cate Blanchett) is an Australian heiress who owns a glass factory and whose independent spirit is at odds with the conservative society in which she lives. Together they embark on the greatest risk of their lives.” --Fox Searchlight.

Director Gillian Armstrong (b. 1950, Melbourne, Australia) studied film at the Swinburne Art School and supported herself as a waitress while completing Australia’s national film school’s course in directing. She became the first Australian woman in 50 years to direct a feature film with her award-winning debut, My Brilliant Career (1979), featuring a star-making turn by Judy Davis in the lead. Armstrong has made her mark with films about unusual women addressing challenging situations, including Mrs. Soffel (1984), High Tide (1987), The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992), and Little Women (1994). In the U.S. to receive the prestigious Women in Film’s Dorothy Arzner Directing Award, in 1996, Armstrong disclosed that “true equality” in a male-dominated industry will only come when “people drop the label ‘woman’ before ‘director’”: directors have “different styles because we’re all different human beings, not because we’re women or men” (Hardesty).

“I love working with writers,” Armstrong testifies, “and have a great appreciation for what they do” (Hardesty). Oscar and Lucinda is an adaptation (by Laura Jones) of the 1988 Booker Prize winning novel by fellow Australian Peter Carey, who collaborated on the screenplay. For years, Armstrong “pined” to make Carey’s offbeat romance into a film. Irresistible to Armstrong were the novel’s rich, complex characters at the “comic and black edge” of fate and death, and its “wonderful themes” and visual imagery “of water and glass and obsession and gambling” (Fox Searchlight). To bring her distinctive visions to the screen, Armstrong storyboards all her films and repeatedly assembles talented film teams, such as Oscar and Lucinda’s cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson (Little Women) and costume designer Janet Patterson (Last Days of Chez Nous). The lush scenery and visual imagery of Oscar and Lucinda are stunning--unforgettable is resonant vision of the delicate glass church floating peacefully downriver. But to capture such shots on location amid floods, thunderstorms, torturous heat and humidity; “mad” devotion and dedicated teamwork (“like an army operation”) were needed (Phan). Indeed, the gritty realities of life continually intrude themselves in this odd and compelling film. Oscar and Lucinda is no typical pretty-period film. “It’s not nice,” Armstrong says, “It’s black and ironic and tragic at times” (qtd. in Phan). But then, so is life.

Casting Lead Actors Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett: Finding the right actor to play Oscar Hopkins was a challenge. The “odd, frail and naïve,” English minister had to project “the inner strength and charm” to make Lucinda and moviegoers “ultimately fall in love with him” (Phan). In the early 1990s, Armstrong first tested Ralph Fiennes (pronounced Rafe Fines; b. 1962, Suffolk, England) for the part, and “I thought he was wonderful” (qtd in Phan). An unknown English stage actor at the time, Fiennes quickly developed a passion for the part, identifying with Oscar’s “continual consternation of trying to work out what’s right and wrong in life” (qtd. in Phan). While Armstrong’s project was delayed for years, Fiennes worked his way to critical and popular acclaim in Schindler’s List (1993) and Quiz Show (1994), as well as in a brilliant turn as Hamlet on London and Broadway stage. To her agent’s dismay, Armstrong returned to Australia after wrapping Little Women in 1994, “to do [Oscar and Lucinda] . . . with no money and considered too tragic to ever succeed” (Phan). Fresh from the success of The English Patient (1996), Fiennes remained committed to playing Oscar though his choice was risky and he accepted a huge pay cut. Armstrong explains, “His agents were saying, ‘You’re a handsome leading man, you can’t go playing this oddbod'” (qtd. in Levy). Fiennes threw himself single-mindedly into the role, down to details such as becoming an expert card shuffler. Of his technique, Fiennes says: “A character becomes something that’s turning around inside your head all the time and it becomes part of you” (qtd. in Levy).

Armstrong’s next challenge was casting the feisty, bloomer-clad Australian heiress, Lucinda Leplastrier, whose scandalous late night gambling in Sidney card rooms shocks her conservative society. Cate Blanchett (b. 1969, Melbourne, Australia) was already a fan of Carey’s novel, which she had read when she was 18 (Membory). A 1992 graduate of Australia’s prestigious national Institute of Dramatic Art, Blanchett decided to pursue acting as a career “when I realised how actors have the power to move people”-and move them she did in award-winning performances on the Australian stage between 1992 and 1995 (Membory). She won the part of Lucinda amid stiff competition, although her only previous film work had been a supporting role in Paradise Road (1997), with Glenn Close and Frances McDormand. Armstrong also felt that Blanchett’s Australian background added authenticity to the story of the independent Australian woman meeting, then falling in love with Fiennes’s Oscar Hopkins, the oddball English clergyman (Phan). Although Blanchett despises gambling, she readily identified with Lucinda’s key “problem…that she was born before her time” (Membory). Blanchett insists that her acting, not her looks, be the center of interviews: “I am responsible for a character’s interior life and how that expresses itself physically,” but she finds it depressing that reviews always comment on "women’s looks, rather than their acting ability” (qtd. in Membory). Blanchett has since secured her reputation as fine actress in Elizabeth (1998), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and An Ideal Husband (1999). Now in demand, Blanchett will play the title character in Armstrong’s forthcoming Charlotte Gray (2001), and the role of Galadriel in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Works Cited

Fox Searchlight. “Directors: Gillian Armstrong: The Interview.” Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2000. <http://www.foxsearchlight.com/directors/gillianarmstrong_dir.html> [accessed Oct. 2000].

Hardesty, Mary. “The Brilliant Career of Gillian Armstrong” [Interview]. DGA [Directors’ Guild of America] Magazine 20-4 (1996): n.pag. <http://www.dga.org/magazine/v20-4/armstrong.html> [accessed Oct. 2000].

Levy, Shawn. “Movie Interview: Ralph Fiennes.” Oregon Live LLC 6 Feb. 1998. [Portland] Oregonian, 1997-1998. <http://www.oregonlive.com/ent/movies/feb98/MV980206_ralph.html> [accessed Oct. 2000].

Membory, York. “Cate’s a Girl to Bet On.” Hot Tickets: Film Review. This Is London: Associated Newspapers Ltd., 18 Mar. 1998. <http://thisislondon/dynamic/hottx/film/film.html> [accessed Oct. 2000].

Phan, Aimee. “Oscar and Lucinda Portrays No Ordinary Love Story.” Daily Bruin Online, 21 Jan. 1998: n. pag. ASUCLA (Associated Students of Univ. of Calif.-Los Angeles).
<http://www-paradigm.asucla.ucla.edu/db/issues/98/01/21/ae.oscar.html> [accessed Oct. 2000].

Handout prepared by Cora Agatucci
for the Fall 2000 Off Beat Cinema Series,
organized by Greg Lyons, with the support of
COCC Humanities Dept. & Westside Video (Bend, OR)

Related links:

Gillian Armstrong. Internet Movie Database - IMDb.com, 1990-2002.
URL: http://us.imdb.com/Name?Armstrong,+Gillian
Oscar and Lucinda (1997). Internet Movie Database - IMDb.com, 1990-2002.
URL: http://us.imdb.com/Title?0119843
...External Reviews: Oscar and Lucinda.
URL: http://us.imdb.com/TUrls?COM+0119843

Gillian Armstrong: Director, Producer. All-Movie Guide. All Media Guide, AEC One Stop Group, Inc., 1992-2002. URL: http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=B79948
...Ralph Fiennes: http://allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=B23390
...Cate Blanchett: http://allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=B215038

Gordon, Mark. "An Interview with Gillian Armstrong." Stage & Screen Web Site, 1997 -Cate Blanchett 2000.
URL: http://www.stageandscreen.com/interv/garmstrong.html [last accessed August 2002].

Margetts, Jayne. 45th Melbourne Film Festival Rev. of Not Fourteen Again, Directed by Gillian Armstrong. Celluloid: The Film Files. IZINE, No date.
"Armstrong, who shot to notoriety with films such as My Brilliant Career, Last Days Of Chez Nous and Little Women, and who began a curious journey by chronicling - at seven-year intervals - the lives, hopes, dreams and realities of three suburban teenagers named Kerry, Diana and Josie, has made an artform of biographical film-making."
URL: http://www.thei.aust.com/isite/cellmffnot14.html [last accessed August 2002].

Urban, Andrew L. Armstrong, Gillian - Charlotte Gray: "The Language Thing." Interviews. Urban Cinefile: The World of Film in Australia on the Internet. May 23, 2002.
"Gillian Armstrong tells Andrew L. Urban why there’s no French spoken in Charlotte Gray, despite her filmmaking instincts, and why English actors play French roles in a film mostly set in France."
URL: http://www.urbancinefile.com.au/home/view.asp?a=6183&s=Interviews

Available online handouts for films shown in Fall 2000 "Offbeat Cinema" Series:

Days of Heaven (1978). Dir. Terrence Malick.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/daysofheaven.htm
Down by Law (1986). Dir. Jim Jarmusch.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/downbylaw.htm
Last Days of Chez Nous (1992). Dir. Gillian Armstrong.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/lastdaysofcheznous.htm
Oscar and Lucinda (1997). Dir. Gillian Armstrong.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/oscarlucinda.htm
The Limey (1999). Dir. Steven Soderbergh.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/thelimey.htm

See also Popular Culture Video List (2000).
Detective | Science fiction | Travel | Film noir | Spy thriller | Western
Greg Lyons, comp. COCC Library & Humanities Dept. video holdings, 2000.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/courses/film/popculture.html

Return to Film Studies - Index of Online Resources
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/index.htm

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Last updated: 26 May 2003
Cora Agatucci ~ E-Mail: cagatucci@cocc.edu
Copyright © 2002-2003, Cora Agatucci
Humanities Department, Central Oregon Community College