Essay

'Lantana' that drives the film into its most climatic acts, and a tragedy in the story that more clearly divides its episodes and links together its characters whose lives are interwoven through little more than circumstance.

These are stories are about middle aged characters and their struggling relationships with each other, solemnly read from a script that is cautiously pessimistic so as not to offer any certainty that its characters will reach a moral high ground.

Capturing universally shared relationship struggles and disguising them as personal tragedies, director Ray Lawrence uses the searching of his characters to construct a relationship prism that reflects parts of our own lives back at us. Determined to portray a breakdown of communication and trust between partners from the very first reel of the film (in which we walk into a hotel room where the main character is cheating on his wife), Lawrence is able to draw believable lives into the frame that avoid preaching about self help epigrams but rather display broader emotions of yearning and dissatisfaction. Our immediate forceful intrusion into the actions of the film's characters keeps their relationships so well focused in its scope that a missing person mystery slips in virtually unnoticed, and it's this mystery that binds the characters together for their final acts.

Anthony LaPaglia plays Leon Zat, a middle aged homicide detective cheating on his wife Sonya (Kerry Armstrong), who continues to grow suspicious of her husband. Both struggle to communicate to each other, and implications are present that is has been a struggling marriage for some time. Dr. Valerie Somers (Barbara Hershey) is a psychiatrist who recently wrote a book about the death of her 11 year old daughter Eleanor. She is married to Jefferey Cox (Geoffery Rush) and, distressed over one of her homosexual clients Patrick Phelan (Peter Phelps), she begins to suspect that Jefferey is having an affair with him. Another marriage stripped of communication and adoration, they both consider their child's death as something that draw them further apart. "I grieve too,"