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Just like artists struggle to portray people smiling without looking like lunatics - which could be one of the reasons why the Mona Lisa endures - just so filmmakers struggle to make good people palatable instead of nauseatingly saccharine.
The Insatiable Moon manages to give goodness a whole new slant - and quite a bit more.
Directed by Rosemarie Riddell and scripted by her husband, Mike, from his novel of the same title, this film bristles with a benign intelligence and courage for the simple reason that it does not avoid pain, but embraces it with an entertaining clarity and compassion.
It might be interesting to know that the director is a judge and the writer is an ex-Baptist minister. If the former shows excellent discernment in her casting and direction, then the latter shows perfect restraint from practising his former profession on celluloid, even though the core scene in the film is set powerfully in a church.
Equally interesting is the fact that the film was funded by friends, in the middle of a recession, and they too showed excellent judgment, since they're sure to make their money back. It is not always thus with so-called crowd-funded films. The excellent cast and crew should also be commended for the work they did on this film, often for little money or none.
So what is it all about? A handful of mental patients are kept in a halfway house in Ponsonby by Bob (an excellent Greg Johnson), a man with a mouth like a sewer and a heart of gold. One of his "inmates" is Arthur, who considers himself the second son of God. Some of his reasoning might well bring him into contention for the No 1 spot, but then he has a vision.
Played by Rawiri Paratene, who effectively insisted himself into the part, he brings a Lear-like majesty to this man who intercedes between the living and the dead, the sane and the insane, the criminal and the law-abiding, the artist and the everyman.
In a hilarious interview with a snooty TV journalist, he quite gently shows her up to be the one who needs therapy, not him.
But the previously working-class suburb of Ponsonby has gone upmarket, and people don't want to live next to these strange and deranged people, one of whom is a convicted paedophile. These are understandable fears and the film deals with those fears rather than scorns or, worse, avoids them.
Bob needs money to keep his halfway house going, the estate agents are knocking at the door like the proverbial wolf, and Arthur has done that one thing that could drive any man insane. He has fallen in love with a vision, an ordinary, unhappily married woman, played pitch-perfectly by Sara Wiseman.
The Insatiable Moon manages to give goodness a whole new slant - and quite a bit more.
Directed by Rosemarie Riddell and scripted by her husband, Mike, from his novel of the same title, this film bristles with a benign intelligence and courage for the simple reason that it does not avoid pain, but embraces it with an entertaining clarity and compassion.
It might be interesting to know that the director is a judge and the writer is an ex-Baptist minister. If the former shows excellent discernment in her casting and direction, then the latter shows perfect restraint from practising his former profession on celluloid, even though the core scene in the film is set powerfully in a church.
Equally interesting is the fact that the film was funded by friends, in the middle of a recession, and they too showed excellent judgment, since they're sure to make their money back. It is not always thus with so-called crowd-funded films. The excellent cast and crew should also be commended for the work they did on this film, often for little money or none.
So what is it all about? A handful of mental patients are kept in a halfway house in Ponsonby by Bob (an excellent Greg Johnson), a man with a mouth like a sewer and a heart of gold. One of his "inmates" is Arthur, who considers himself the second son of God. Some of his reasoning might well bring him into contention for the No 1 spot, but then he has a vision.
Played by Rawiri Paratene, who effectively insisted himself into the part, he brings a Lear-like majesty to this man who intercedes between the living and the dead, the sane and the insane, the criminal and the law-abiding, the artist and the everyman.
In a hilarious interview with a snooty TV journalist, he quite gently shows her up to be the one who needs therapy, not him.
But the previously working-class suburb of Ponsonby has gone upmarket, and people don't want to live next to these strange and deranged people, one of whom is a convicted paedophile. These are understandable fears and the film deals with those fears rather than scorns or, worse, avoids them.
Bob needs money to keep his halfway house going, the estate agents are knocking at the door like the proverbial wolf, and Arthur has done that one thing that could drive any man insane. He has fallen in love with a vision, an ordinary, unhappily married woman, played pitch-perfectly by Sara Wiseman.
This may be a small film - a kind of benevolent One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, if you will - but it is one that has a massive heart and an even clearer mind; one that somehow manages to encapsulate everything that is good (and wrong) about the suburb, country and world in which it is set.
Neil Sonnekus
* The Insatiable Moon opens on October 7 at Rialto cinemas. Next week I'll be talking to author and screenwriter Mike Riddell.
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