Andrew Adamson's adaptation of Lloyd Jones' Man Booker Prize-shortlisted 2006 novel arrives in our cinemas on the back of dismissive reviews in the trade press after its first screening at the Toronto Film Festival a year ago.
It has emerged from another few months in the editing suite about 15 minutes shorter, which is doubtless a good thing since it is by no means too short now. It's tighter and clearer, Adamson says, and there have been substantial cuts to two brutal scenes, one of which is jarringly obvious. But, on the strength of the new version, it's hard to agree with the Northern Hemisphere reviewers who found it variously overblown or earnest.
In the new cut, Adamson has nailed the essence of the novel - what he has called in one interview "a story about the power of story" - while coming up with innovative cinematic solutions to the interiority of the novel's first-person point of view.
The director, who also wrote the script, spent his teenage years in Papua New Guinea, and plainly inhaled its essence long ago. It's difficult to imagine that many other filmmakers would have insisted on shooting in the remote and inaccessible places where the real-life events took place, rather than in a stand-in location in Queensland or the Pacific.
Adamson told an industry screening last week that many of the cast members had lived through the war that drives the story's drama; for them it was not acting, but re-enacting.
