Male order

Gabriel Byrne, star of the Ray Lawrence film Jindabyne. (Steve Carty/CBC)

Jindabyne — a word that sounds like a candy or a poison — is a tiny town on the edge of a vast lake, five and a half hours from Sydney on a baked piece of southeast Australia. It is also the setting, and the title, of a film adaptation of a famous Raymond Carver short story called So Much Water So Close to Home. Though the latitude is lower, the jagged beauty marks the area as spiritual kin to the Pacific Northwest where Carver set his acclaimed, spare set pieces about working-class Americans.

Gabriel Byrne, who stars in Jindabyne, remembers reading Carver’s poetry when he was a teacher living in Dublin. “To the Waterfall had a profound effect on me. I felt like I was the first one to read it,” he says in an interview during the Toronto International Film Festival last September. “Every one of his stories is shot through with compassion for the people he writes about, and those small moments that go by without registering, but that have a profound effect on our whole lives.”

Byrne stars as Stewart, a man who takes a fishing trip with his friends as an escape from his depressed wife, played by Laura Linney, only to encounter the dead body of an aboriginal woman floating down the river. The men tie the body to a rock and continue with their fly-fishing. When they return to Jindabyne, Stewart’s wife is horrified by his inaction, and gradually, the entire town joins the chorus of moral condemnation: Was this act of nothing, this anti-heroism, a result of sexism or racism? What does it mean to respect the dead? Why do men do the things they do?

By plunking the film down in Australia, and making the leads — without explanation — an American woman and an Irishman, the film widens Carver’s vision. To some, of course, tampering with his economy is taboo: in a recent New York Times review, A.O. Scott wrote that “the clean, efficient lines of Carver’s story are blurred and tangled.”

But Australian director Ray Lawrence is attempting to do something quite different with the story from what Robert Altman did when he shrank it to its most intimate dimensions and nestled the segment amongst several other Carver-inspired pieces in Short Cuts. Lawrence’s version does maintain the sense of human isolation that haunts Carver’s work, though for him, it’s not only people (especially husbands and wives) who are crippled by uncrossed emotional distance, but also cultures: the accident causes Jindabyne’s citizens to finally acknowledge the chasms between aborginals and whites, and men and women.

“Women react differently to trauma and to grief than the culture allows men to,” says Byrne. “The emotional shorthand between women seems to be much more sophisticated and layered and dimensional than it is between men. Men tend to react in silence, shut down, and denial. They also look for a justification that doesn’t require enormous verbalization of any emotional feeling.”

Claire Kane (Laura Linney) and Stewart Kane (Gabriel Byrne) are implicated in a murder in Jindabyne. (Matt Netheim/April Films/Mongrel Media)

Byrne, a Dublin-born actor who first gained attention as a reluctant gangster in the Coen Brothers’ 1990 breakout film Miller’s Crossing, often plays characters with a masculine urge to dominate. In films like The Usual Suspects (he played a crooked cop), Assault on Precinct 13 (a more crooked cop) and End of Days (Satan), violence stirs at the edges of his broad, handsome face. Though Jindabyne’s Stewart is a loving father, he always seems to be attempting to contain his bad instincts; he’s a man in emotional lockdown.

It’s a version of masculinity that jibes with the decade-long popular conversation about the crisis of male identity. When the Jindabyne men escape to their fishing spot, they heave a sigh of relief, as if returned to some elemental freedom not permitted them as fathers and husbands. The furor around the dead body illuminates their confused status: the townspeople need the men to be heroic, manly and dispassionate, but become furious that they aren’t emotionally available and expressive, too. It’s a tall order.

When I ask Byrne if this is a complicated time to be a man, he nods fast, locking his already intense gaze, and tells a story about how uncomfortable people are with male emotion. Years ago, while working on a film in which his character witnessed his wife being unfaithful, he decided to respond with a breakdown, and played the moment in tears.

“Afterwards, I found out they cut the scene,” he recalls. “I was curious, and they said it was because audiences don’t want to see a man crying in close-up. It was a very interesting observation, from a female producer, too. There’s still something profoundly upsetting about a man completely overcome by emotion and crying.”

Byrne was reminded of that moment when he asked Lawrence not to let him see the body before shooting the pivotal scene, when the dead woman appears, drifting like debris in the river where Stewart is fishing. Lawrence, best known for the 2001 film Lantana, directed Jindabyne in a naturalistic style, without makeup or lights, preferring to shoot the scenes in one take.

“I told Ray: ‘I don’t know how I’m going to react to this body.’ There was a choice of a heroic reaction, or being stoic, and saying: ‘Hey guys, there's a dead body.’ But in the moment, I chose to go with the less masculine version, which is the guy falls apart and the camera pulls back to reveal how utterly alone he is,” says Byrne. They did it in one shot. “There’s nothing heroic in that moment when [the body is discovered and] the men come running. One guy falls and damages his ankle. These men don’t know how to react. And then the audience is implicated, because the audience has seen it, too.”

Byrne has been honing his craft on stage the past few years, earning a Tony nomination for Eugene O’Neill’s Moon for the Misbegotten in 2000, and returning to O’Neill in 2005 on Broadway with A Touch of the Poet. When Lawrence approached Byrne for Jindabyne, he told him making the film would be a “spiritual journey.” For Byrne, it was an intriguing invitation, one that reinvigorated his affection for his profession. After working as a schoolteacher, an archaeologist and a cook, Byrne came to acting in his 30s. It’s a job he still finds mystifying, he admits.

“I wish someone would do an in-depth analytical study of what it is that makes people become actors. One of the very first descriptions of it that I heard is that ‘acting is the shy man’s revenge,’ which I think is true,” he says. “For a business that’s so much filled with rejection and humiliation and competition, it’s amazing that the people who are drawn to it seem to be the people who are least equipped to deal with it. But I think if my career as an actor has taught me anything, it’s that one learns to accept that rejection and loss are essential parts of living. It doesn’t really matter whether people acclaim you or whether the film you’ve done happens to be amazing. It doesn’t make you any happier as an individual coming to terms with who you are.”

At 57, Byrne, a father to two teenagers from a former marriage to actress Ellen Barkin, appears relaxed, eager to take stock.

So what, then, does matter?

“The things that matter to most people. I’m afraid of the same things. I worry about the same things. Acting is a job I do for 16 weeks of the year, the rest of the time I’m a father, friend, Irish, New Yorker — all the things that go with being alive,” he says, making his movie-star existence sound at once as small and as profound as the lives of Carver’s characters. “Somehow, I used to have the idea that people who were successful didn’t have to experience life the same way other people did. But we all get to suffer.”

Jindabyne opens May 11 in Toronto and Vancouver.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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