25th Anniversary: "Shine"
Sunday, November 21, 2021 at 7:00PM by Nick Taylor
One of my favorite bits of This Had Oscar Buzz’s year in review episodes is the segments where they discuss a film that overcame its middling quality to cash in on their buzz and score with the Academy. This is the energy I bring to you for my 25th anniversary retrospective of Shine, an Australian film that copped seven Oscar nominations and a Best Actor prize for Geoffrey Rush in his starmaking role. I do not remember hearing or reading a single solitary comment about this film in the years since I became a cinephile. The closest I’ve ever gotten comes courtesy of folks sticking up for their personal pet among 1996’s Best Actor lineup, or scattered comments that Geoffrey Rush was better in his other nominated performances. It’s slim pickings, and having finally seen Shine for myself, I find very little of worth to really excavate here. Who’s to say how much the Artist Biopic has fundamentally changed from one decade to the next?
Our protagonist is David Helfgott (played by Alex Rafalowicz as a child, Noah Taylor as a teenager, and Geoffrey Rush as an adult), an Australian pianist who became famous in his youth and was institutionalized for years in his adulthood following a breakdown at a college recital...