In today's (London) Sunday Times
Time to face the music
Out of Tune
David Helfgott and the Myth of Shine
by Margaret Helfgott
Warner Books 15.99 pp294
Dan Cairns
Sibling rivalry and the often gruelling obstacle course of family life
will be fresh in the minds of many at this time, soon after Christmas:
a period when renewed proximity can cause unsettled scores to clamour
for resolution, reinforcing in some the belief that the nest was flown
with good reason in the first place.
Differing perceptions of a shared past are at the heart of Margaret
Helfgott's impassioned, anguished book. The author's brother is the
Australian pianist David Helfgott, whose descent into madness provided
the raw material for the hugely successful 1996 film Shine. Margaret's
contention - and her case is a powerful one - is that Shine rides
roughshod over the facts. Her chief complaint is that the role played
by the late Peter Helfgott in his children's upbringing has been grossly
misrepresented. The film portrays the collapse of David's health as
being the direct, inevitable result of his father's psychological and
physical tyranny. Yet, if Margaret is to be believed, the family home
was a place of music and laughter, intellectually vibrant and healthily
competitive, in which their father was a benign and supportive presence.
Moreover, the film conveniently ignores David's diagnosis as a sufferer
from schizo-affective disorder, and the fact that the family has a
history of mental illness. Certainly, the film's director Scott Hicks
and David's second wife Gillian - who on the evidence here is positively
Chekhovian in her usurpative appetites - could be said to be guilty of
a selective approach to David's life. Hicks bombastically describes his
mission to bring David's story to the screen as a "10-year odyssey", yet
he fails during this presumably busy-bee decade to talk to any of the
key people who nurtured David's prodigious gifts or pulled him back
from the brink of self-destruction: his three sisters, brother, mother,
piano teachers, girlfriends, first wife - all remain unspoken to, their
anxious requests for information about the film rebuffed, their
telephone calls unanswered. The only sop is a disclaimer at credits'
end, so tiny that a projectionist enlisted by the family takes two days
with a magnifying glass to decipher its grudging qualification.
Instead, Hicks films what might more accurately be called Gillian's
Story. In this, more Hollywood-friendly version, it is Gillian who
rides to David's rescue, who puts him back on the concert stage in what
one critic described as a "grotesque circus", and who, his sister
alleges, reduces his medication to increase his performing edge.
Shine received its British television premiere last week and was as
compelling as ever. It may not be true, of course, but when did that
ever get in the way of a good story?
Tony Duggan
Staffordshire,
United Kingdom.
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