Walking on Water (2002)
Friends and family gather around the death bed of Gavin, where they assist in the dying man's suicide. But though Gavin's pain has been laid to rest, the grief felt by everyone there has only begun, and Walking on Water compassionately follows the attempts of Gavin's closest friends Anna and Charlie to recover from their loss.
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Waste of time
Dreadfully Boring
This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.
It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review
This film is OK. It positions itself safely in the territory of Lantanaland...earnest, frank, emotionally charged and sometimes tawdry. The shots are uninspired as are the ideas the story is dealing with. Grief is sad....but can we go deeper? Can we dig a bit more and discover something truly perverse or honest about ourselves. Maybe his friends don't really care all that much. Maybe his mother is just a tad less likable. I am not sure. In the end...it all seemed a bit cinematic ally safe. Everything made too much sense. Everything had been worked over far too much. LIFE is a great film about AIDS. SAFE and POISON are great films too. This is good but feels a bit like movie of the week.
Tony Ayers shows great promise as a director and I will be keen to see what he does next but this film was riddled with cliches. It was a film where I think the characters needed to be developed more fully at a script stage. It was an attempt to show a gay relationship in a different way but really it fails satisfy.
Gavin is dying, presumably from AIDS. He wants to die at home and asks for help from his friends and family. The friends include Charlie and Anna, the latter of whom is also Gavin's business partner. Family includes Gavin's mother and brother, the latter of whom arrives with his wife and child.Unfortunately, Gavin's departure is not as smooth as was planned, which serves as a catalyst for everyone else's problems to come out. Besides the obvious grief, we see addictive behavior from several people. We also see people try to use sex to deal with their pain. This is fairly balanced between heterosexuality and homosexuality, although until I thought about it afterwards, the film seemed heavily skewed towards the latter. My personal discomfort had affected my perception.The acting is definitely a strong point in this film. Almost all of the performances are very good, and some are amazing, including one scene with Gavin's brother later in the film. There are is some excellent cinematography outdoors, especially of the ocean (presumably taken near Sydney, Australia, where the film takes place).Seen on 11/2/2002 at the 2002 Hawaii International Film Festival.
Can you think of any movie whose main characters are homosexual which isn't all about homosexuality? I can't, but this is one, and it was such a delight to witness. Fantastic acting, very realistic slice of life, but not much of a storyline. I was disappointed to see that of the two big sex scenes in the movie, the homo one was over in a flash, and the het bonkathon, as usual, seemed to go on forever. Ah well, you can't have everything in a movie, I suppose.