A nearly great and nearly completely ignored movie: Lantana

"Lanatana" is a movie too good, too quiet, and too true to really ever find its deserved audience - makes you sick. This Australian film is one of those multiple point of view, several strands to the story, you're not clear how or if the strands will intersect, then ultimately the whole design become clear to you. LA Confidential did this well years ago; Crash won an Oscar for this a few years back, and I thought it was a pretentious, phony piece of crap (though I do like Thandi Newton, who doesn't?). Lanatana was low budget, and so much smarter than Crash and its ilk - following the story of a cop (Anthony LaPaglia) as he embarks on an affair and puts his marriage at risk, a psychiatrist (Barbara Hershey) who's grieving the death of her daughter and worried about the state of her marriage), a single woman (seductress, separated, dangerous), a young couple (stressed, tempestuous, sweet), a gay man (patient of Hershey's, comabative), a few others. The movie's so smart that it sets out some clues that each of the 4 of us watching thought we were following - we said, come on, this is so obvious, we thought the movie was heading toward trightness - then it surprised us in a lot of ways - and unlike so many movies and TV series with "surprises," these were all credible and in character. And the film also has a serious dramatic dimension. Yes, it's about a murder investigation (we see the body in the first frames), but it's truly about people coming to terms with marriage and trust and faith and infidelity. My only quibble really is the relentless jazzy mood music (I think Crash had this, too - why?). Otherwise a near-great and nearly completely ignored movie.