Surprisingly incoherent and boring

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

To everyone who has seen SHINE and/or read Gillian Helfgott's book: If you really care about being fully informed, you need to read Margaret Helfgott's book OUT OF TUNE: DAVID HELFGOTT AND THE MYTH OF SHINE.

David Helfgott (Geoffrey Rush) can't stop talking and unable to relate normally. He surprises everybody by being a great pianist. As a child, he struggles under his domineering father Peter (Armin Mueller-Stahl). He's a child prodigy. His father pushes him to the breaking point by insisting on playing the difficult Rachmaninoff. As a young man (Noah Taylor), he gains some success and eventually escapes from his abusive father to go to school in London. He breaks down and is institutionalized.The adult Helfgott is fascinating with a terrific performance from Geoffrey Rush. His reveal to his acquaintances is a great scene. However half of the movie doesn't have Rush. It's about the younger Helfgott and the best part is his crazy father. It's a disturbing performance from Armin Mueller-Stahl. Noah Taylor also does a nice job.

I did some reading after this driven by idle curiosity about the account. The real Helfgott didn't spend 15 years abandoned in a room with a piano, he didn't have to stand in the rain outside of a bar before they would let him in, he was pretty well known in the local scene as a pianist, his father was not a Holocaust survivor and David had been married before, father and son were never really estranged and David was present at his funeral.But the 'objective' point-of-view that purports to explain him, or any of us at any time based on a few facts, is in the end no less hypocritical than any attempt to pass dramatization as 'the real story'. This matters. Someone can be present at a funeral without being truly present, and someone can feel forgotten and alone even when they're factually surrounded by people, estranged from a parent even when formally this was never so.The film is at a simple emotional level where the attempt to conquer a maddening complexity (music, life) snaps the tethers of mind and in due time the reconfiguring of this damage into blossoming art. The moral is that we must keep trying and hope for the best, perhaps the worthiest lesson even if it appears slightly trite in the context of a more or less happy ending. Still, why feel the need to invent all those things, knowing you are doing nothing short of that? When the inflicted violence on the son could be inferred by a more ambiguous tension instead of an outright beating.Because, it seems, we can only choose to accept the lesson if at the center we find a good soul worthy of the saving. In other words, it is not the fact that he gives a great last recital that matters, but that he plays at all, not that a genius was salvaged because he might never have been that, but a human being. And this is what rankles so much Helfgott's piano critics who find him borderline incompetent in his playing - he is cheered on in concerts because he is the character from this film.Ideally we would be able to discern all these points here instead of one harmony: the truly damaged but kind soul, the inability to place blame for that damage on any ogre father or Holocaust, and being able to somehow experience his music (the real Helfgott recorded for the film) as a trained ear would, fixated flourishes followed by distraction and incompetence according to critics, musically extending the damaged self.For a more demanding film on the same subject of madness and transcendent musical genius see a little known film on a medieval composer called Death in Five Voices: all about the dissonance between different voices trying to harmonize a story and this carried in the music itself.

Rush plays the man, and does a brilliant job. Yesterday (August 2013) I saw David in person, playing the piano in a performance in Cairns. To see him in real life, and playing as brilliantly as he does, makes one realise how close the film is to his actual life. If you don't get the opportunity to see David in real life, second best is to watch this film. Of course, there is some editorial licence in the film, and it is nigh on impossible to get into a person's head and way of thinking, but the flavour is there in the film. This film has not only entertainment value, but is a pseudo documentary about the life of a still-brilliant performer. When I saw David play live, I wondered how he could remember all the music without using any sheet music, and it was obvious by his mannerisms that he is still mentally affected - nevertheless, I believe he is one of the world's best pianists.