Subtitles:

English (SDH), English, French, Spanish, none

Extras:

• Commentary by Director Gillian Armstrong
• Interview with Director Gillian Armstrong (8:15 in SD)
• Interview with Producer Margaret Fink (8:31 in SD)
• Cannes Film Festival Premiere
• The Miles Franklin Story (4:04 in SD)
• Trailers

"My Brilliant Career" marks the beginning of exactly that for both the film's daring, assured, high-spirited Australian director, Gillian Armstrong, and its rambunctious young star. Adapted from a semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, it offers a turn-of-the-century heroine who seems to have wandered from the pages of a Louisa May Alcott novel into the Australian Outback, where her buoyant sense of mischief takes on the same grand dimensions as the exotic, perpetually surprising terrain.

Sybylla Melvyn (played by Judy Davis, making her movie debut) is supposed to be plain. And she's sufficiently strange-looking, by movie-star standards, to strike the viewer as being something less than a ravishing beauty. But that effect lasts only a short while — only for as long as it takes to realize that Miss Davis brings an unconventional vigor to every scene she's in, even in a film that's as consistently animated as this one. Her Sybylla is a coltish creature, creating a merry chaos wherever she goes.

Because her mother has been married badly, Sybylla grows up in relatively impoverished surroundings. Then, at the age of 18 or so, she is sent to live with her wealthy grandmother, who is no great advocate of sprightly behavior. Nevertheless, Sybylla flourishes, especially after making the acquaintance of handsome Harry, the most eligible bachelor in the area. If this sounds like the backdrop for something like "The Thorn Birds," well, it plays a bit like an extravagantly old-fashioned romance, too. Sybylla, who has been well warned that someone like Harry (Sam Neill) can never marry someone like her, continues to defy social convention, with her flashing eyes and her wicked smile and her propensity for starting pillow fights in the middle of the afternoon. After a very sweet and feisty courtship, she lands Harry anyhow.

Gary Tooze

November 24th, 2009