Little Fish

Herald rating: * * * *

A colleague remarked that this is the summer's feelgood movie: you'd better feel good when you go in because you certainly won't when you come out.

That's a warning - it's a film that may depress you. This will come as no surprise to anyone who saw Woods' hard but brilliant 1998 debut The Boys, a distressing depiction of the emotional illiteracy and animal cruelty of an urban family of crims.

The lead character in this film, the tellingly named Tracy Heart (Blanchett), is doing everything she can to not be a crim. A thirtysomething ex-junkie, she lives with her worn and weary mother, Janelle (a brilliant Hazlehurst) who has little faith her daughter will stay clean. She works in a video store in Sydney's Little Saigon area of Cabramatta and wants a bank loan to start a cybercafe - no easy task with her bad credit record and the gaping holes in her CV.

Tracy remains on good terms with her estranged stepfather, Lionel Dawson (Weaving), a one-time league hero who is now a hopeless junkie; she used to do drugs with him and now she just wants to stop him doing drugs.

Adding to the toxic slurry of relationships in her circle are Brad Thompson (Neill), Lionel's dealer and occasional lover; Tracy's amputee brother, Ray (Henderson), a keen novice in the drug-dealing business; and her former dealer and boyfriend Jonny (Nguyen).

Plainly, Tracy is in a minefield of temptation and Blanchett, who has blossomed into the kind of magnetically watchable presence that constitutes a real star, walks through it with a dignified and watchful sadness.

Though we never really doubt her will to survive, her performance is imbued with brittle and fragile bravado and a sense that any minute everything could turn to custard.

The script runs several subplots in parallel, and though it's never hard to follow, some of the relationships, particularly between Tracy and Lionel, are revealed only slowly, which keeps us on edge.

The dialogue, full of jagged unfinished sentences and broken-down conversations, adds to the effectiveness.

It is, in the end, a film of performances and Blanchett's superb turn at the centre of a fine ensemble is matched by a breathtakingly convincing display from Weaving.

It's a pleasure to see a movie chocka with great Australasian performances, and the Kiwi contingent carries the flag high.

We can see the little boy behind Henderson's blowhard macho man, and Tobeck is a sleazy and genuinely scary hood, although Sam Neill's malevolence has a touch of the quizzical about it, as if he's wondering what he's doing being quite so nasty.

The film loses focus in the final quarter and the ending rather seems to sidestep the issues it's raised in favour of going to the beach for the afternoon.

That is, one has to say, the Australian way, but it's a slightly unsatisfying end to an otherwise very impressive movie.CAST: Cate Blanchett, Sam Neill, Hugo Weaving, Martin Henderson, Noni Hazlehurst, Dustin Nguyen, Joel Tobeck
DIRECTOR: Rowan Woods
RUNNING TIME: 115 minutes
RATING: R16, contains drug use and offensive language
SCREENING: Rialto