Top of the Lake

If anyone doesn't know, Top of the Lake is a new sort-of crime-ish drama series, set in the South Island of New Zealand made by Jane Campion and starring Holly Hunter and Elizabeth Moss, currently being shown here in the UK  on BBC2.

 

I might well have given it a miss since neither Campion nor Hunter are a draw for me. Am I the only person in the Western Hemisphere who just wanted to give Hunter's character in The Piano Player a good slap? Possibly I am, but I don't care. I thought it was one of the most pretentious films I had ever seen. But I digress....

 

The reason I watched Top of the Lake was because David Wenham is in it and he's a fine actor for whom I have a lot of time. His comic sidekick in Van Helsing was the only thing that made that film even remotely watchable. He was a heart breaking Faramir in Lord of the Rings.  He was almost convincing as a Spartan general in 300, a film I love but which does fall a bit short on credibility in many respects, not least the (lack of) costuming. And he gave a stand out performance in Oranges and Sunshine. If you haven't seen Oranges and Sunshine incidentally it is well worth watching.

 

Sadly the casting of DW does little to reconcile me to this extremely slow and irritating series. I'm not a fan of Elizabeth Moss either as an actor or for her character in this piece. The 'characters' are cardboard cut outs who scarcely deserve the accolade of 'stereotypes', the pace is excruciatingly slow and the police procedure, what little of it that there seems to be,  is quite frankly non-credible.

 

I'm led to wonder if Campion knew what she wanted to do with this piece. It might be satirical, when you look at the buffoons who apparently* frequent the bars of small NZ towns and man its police force, not to mention the strange assortment of women at the locally established 'women's camp'. It might be a comment on corruption, or child abuse, it might be a story about how you can never go back to your past, or that a prophet is never honoured in their own country. It has elements of all of these things but it doesn't add up to a whole of anything. In fact I have grave doubts that I shall manage to stick with it, the presence of DW notwithstanding.

 

*I say apparently because when we visited NZ a few years ago we met with nothing but charming, helpful and friendly people, who had about as much in common with the dreary misanthropes and miserable downtrodden inhabitants of Top of the Lake as real space travel has to the antics of Flash Gordon.

 

It does have one thing in common with The Piano though. I still want to give Holly Hunter's character a good slap.