Gregor Jordan

(On Cable TV, March 2022) As much as I like novel-to-movie adaptations for how they often have more ambitious narratives than original screenplays (especially at the low end), I’m finding more and more evidence of adaptations being hampered by the creative choices made by the work they’re adapting. And that’s not mentioning when novels that have no business being adapted to the big screen nonetheless get the cinematic treatment. I have not read the novel from which Dirt Music is adapted, but I can recognize how it could be a much better work than what ended up on screen. It’s not a complete disappointment: director Gregor Jordan creates a captivating atmosphere out of its Western Australia landscape, and there are moments when it feels as if the film will finally do something with its blend of lust, jealousy, hardscrabble characters and harsh natural landscapes. But the consummation of those elements never comes. As a woman and a man go through the aftermath of their affair’s discovery, it feels as if the film is constantly on the verge of turning into a genre picture. But it never does: prisoner of its source material, unable to commit to a streamlined narrative, it loses itself in a dozen different subplots, backstories, half-hearted developments and a muddled mess that fails to adapt what feels like a subtle piece of prose. Garrett Hedlund and the always-compelling Kelly Macdonald are not bad as the leads, but they can’t fix a broken script that doesn’t know where to go. Human melodrama undermines the great nature cinematography and leaves no one happy. Now give a gun to the characters and have them shoot at each other in-between chases in the Australian outback and you’d have something worth paying attention to—not necessarily something good, mind you, but at least something with a point and a pulse.