Holy Smoke!
by Jane Campion
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Product details
Actor: Daniel Wyllie, Harvey Keitel, Julie Hamilton, Kate Winslet, Sophie LeeDirector: Jane Campion
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Original Language), Analog
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
Running Time: 114 minutes
Release Date: 2001-03-13
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Publisher: Walt Disney Video
Studio: Walt Disney Video
VHS Movie Reviews of Holy Smoke!
Movie Review: A Complete Misfire
Summary: 1 Stars
One of worst films associated with director Jane Campion, performers Kate Winslet and Harvey Keitel, or anyone else. "Holy Smoke!" (1999) is self-indulgent claptrap with no laughs or sociological insight. Considering the amount of talent involved, the results are excruciatingly painful. Winslet tries, but Keitel is often embarrassing to watch. El stinko!Movie Review: Kate Winslett in the Buff
Summary: 3 Stars
An Australian film that exposes Kate to the fullest. A strong performance
by Harvey Kietel. Worth seeing.
Movie Review: Ultimately goes up in smoke...
Summary: 2 Stars
When your big breakout film is `The Piano', which is possibly one of the greatest films ever made, there is a big weight on your shoulders to create something of equal magnitude your next go around. Campion proved herself a very interesting and unique visionary director with `The Piano', but `Holy Smoke' seems like a giant step backwards.
Please note that this is very hard for me to say, beings that I worship the ground Kate Winslet walks on.
`Holy Smoke' deals with a very deep and poignant premise; a young woman being brainwashed by religion and her family desperately seeking to free her from her mental bondage. The premise really could have given birth to a fantastic character study and marvelously rooted importance, especially with Winslet and Keitel onboard, but instead it proves to be a missed opportunity. The film, although sporting a weighty subject, feels empty; lacking in substance. It almost makes light of a very tragic subject, and while Winslet tries hard to bring an air of honesty to her performance the script ultimately bogs her down to where her character comes off uninteresting.
Ruth Barron, after visiting with friends in India, finds herself under the spell of a certain cult, uprooting her life for a new. Her friends and family are worried, obviously, and hire a deprogrammer, PJ Waters, to break that spell. Waters has some issues of his own, issues that in my opinion get in the way of the heart of the story. We seem to focus more on his relationship with Ruth (as troubled as it may be) instead of the real reason for his entrance into her life. She is to spend three days with him, and in those three days he is to attempt to bring her to reason.
`Holy Smoke' has its moments, moments where Winslet breaks away from the confines of the script and actually relays to the audience the weight of this subject. You can see in her eyes the deception and then total plunge into confusion as her newfound beliefs come crashing down on her. Sadly, these moments are few and far in between. The sub-plots involving Waters and even Ruth's family take center stage and crowd out the real root of the story.
Campion loses her grip on this one, but she still has `The Piano' to reference when considering her talent. Winslet delivers a fine performance, but the script barely gives her room to truly shine. Many consider this her finest performance, but I consider this more her greatest character, and had that character been written better it could have proved to be her greatest performance. Keitel, an actor I usually enjoy, is rather uninspired here and delivers a tragically overrated performance. Yes, Winslet is really the only redeeming factor for this film, and she can only redeem so much on her own.
Movie Review: Caught by the other side of the mind
Summary: 4 Stars
The typical neurotic or psychotic schizophrenia of the western world suddenly confronted to the other side of the conscious controlling and tyrannical psyche of the Christian mental delinquent. One day they meet with those who do not believe in reason but only in hypnosis and meditation. But do not think these manipulators are the criminals. They are just revealing that the subconscious or the unconscious can take over and become the central axle of our psyche, not because we would be losing our minds but because it IS the central axle of the human psyche. Twenty centuries of Christianity, on the western side, more generally thirty centuries of Semitic religion on the Jewish, Christian and Moslem sides have shifted our psyche from the natural central axle to re-center it onto what we call consciousness, reason and logic. We have just repressed the rest under the name of unconscious and subconscious, even the ID of Sigmund Doctor Freud. It is obvious to anyone who has some sense that all other traditions that are five or ten thousand old are more human than our short lived one (or ones) but we don't know. We have forgotten how the basic and fundamental element of our Semitic traditions, the famous Genesis is the total and systematic rejection of the previous principles to replace them with a new one, the vision of the sole God and his spirit creating everything from nothing. When we can meet with the older tradition we get berserk, mesmerized and even hypnotized and we accuse that other tradition to manipulate our minds though we have willfully castrated and destroyed the deeper side of our awareness of life. This film is nothing but the revelation of the depth of this western alienation and self-amputation and at the same time the absolute impossibility to let go with our artificial beings and enter the meditation that would make us merge with the living force of the universe and not the survival instinct of our mechanized, scientized and technologized petty umbilical enjoyment of the city ghettos in which we live. Out worse invention was Scientology that turns this artificial life and thinking of ours front side back by grafting the mental depth of Asian philosophy onto the antagonistic existentialism of psychoanalysis. Mark my word. The Chinese and the Indians right now, and some others along with them, are doing just the reverse and they will take over the world because they will still be rotating around the real axle of humanity and life, the mental force as opposed to reason and logic. We will understand that and react when it will be too late because we cannot cope with the idea that we had had it all wrong all along and that the real stuff is still alive in Asia and is coming of age after a long hibernation. That is not going to be "Good Morning Vietnam" but both "Good Night Western Hemisphere" and "Good Morning Far East of the Rising Sun". The film is trying to make us believe we still have a chance. It is full of beans. We don't even have one tenth of a chance. We are looking in the west for the generation of leaders who are going to bring us to that consciousness: If we are lucky the USA will choose the right man in November, not the one who knows how to win wars, but the one who believes in change, not because he is going to bring that change, but because he will have to be able to welcome the change that is coming all by itself.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Movie Review: This was quite good
Summary: 5 Stars
Who really brainwashes who? Are we all brainwashed? Is love just brainwashing or does love set us free?
A lot of interesting questions are raised, and the results are entertaining. The ending left me slightly empty, but overall a fun and well made movie.
Summary of Holy Smoke!
Aussie director Jane Campion's one of a kind. Forget money and fame; she's inspired by the pleasure of sharing her cinematic dreams with friends and film audiences. Her globetrotting heroines (Angel at My Table, The Piano, Portrait of a Lady) may be willful, crazed, self-absorbed, wrong--but who can resist joining these passionate women on their voyages of self-discovery, whether they lead to safe harbor or dead end?Holy Smoke opens deliriously in a magical India, saturated with light, color, sensuality. Celebrated by Neil Diamond's anthem, "Holly Holy," Ruth Baron (Kate Winslet, delivering a breathtakingly luminous performance) explores a world that encourages spiritual epiphany--and falls hard for the cartoonish guru who opens her "third eye." Back home in Australia, her hilariously dysfunctional, distinctly down-to-earth family hires hotshot deprogrammer PJ Waters (Harvey Keitel, his dyed hair and cowboy boots telegraphing desperate machismo) to cure Ruth. In an isolated Outback shack, Campion's duo wrestle each other for control of their souls--and bodies, too. This duel's in deadly earnest: Ruth assaults Waters's petrified masculinity; PJ aims to strip this radiant girl of her unexamined faith.
Their wild ride--funny, brutal, erotic--toward brand-new selfhood is punctuated by indelible images: Ruth dancing in a white sari beside an emu corral; naked in the night, Ruth offering her lush body to her tormentor; lost in the desert, cross-dressed in red gown, PJ "saved" by a golden vision of Ruth as a magnificent Indian goddess. For those who love the way movies can sometimes project truth and beauty, Holy Smoke is a feast for the eyes--and for the mind. --Kathleen Murphy
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