Word: ada
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...Piano" begins, Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter) has become the mail-order bride of Alistair Stewart (Sam Neill), a farmer in the remote bush of nineteenth century New Zealand whom she has never met. Together with her nine-year-old daughter Flora (Anna Paquin) and her piano, Ada makes the long voyage by sea from Scotland to New Zealand. When Stewart arrives to meet her, he refuses to transport her piano to their house, leaving it on the beach...
...Ada, who has been mute since the age of six and for whom the piano is her only voice, is devastated by its loss. She turns to George Baines (Harvey Keitel), an illiterate neighbor of theirs who has "gone native." Baines eventually makes a deal with Stewart, trading the piano for a piece of land. As part of the deal, Ada is forced to give Baines lessons. He's not interested in learning to play, and so he offers to give Ada back her piano if she allows him to do certain things while she plays, one key for every...
...abundant. The jungle teems with life, and the knee-deep mud threatens to hold the inhabitants fast. The majority of the colonists attempt to barricade themselves against the overwhelming fecundity of the land, closing ranks and trying to maintain the forms of the English motherland. Only Baines and Ada meet the challenges posed by their surroundings. There is a passion in their characters which rises up to meet the passion of nature around them...
...these things would be useless if the film did not contain performances to match. Campion's direction is perhaps her greatest achievement in "The Piano." A nearly unrecognizable Holly Hunter is simply amazing as Ada. Despite the fact that she does not utter a word during the movie, Hunter manages to provide a full-bodied portrait of Ada, so that the audience knows what she is thinking and feeling without her having to articulate it. Ada marks Hunter's best work on screen thus far. Keeping up with Hunter is Anna Paquin as Ada's daughter Flora. Paquin brings...
This is a closet drama, but the closet has a window with a view of the sea. In an early scene Ada comes to the beach and finds her piano in a crate. Opening it, she plays ecstatically; her daughter dances gaily, garlanded in seaweed; and Baines gets a first inkling of the lifeline that art is for Ada. The camera ascends to Campion's favorite bird's-eye view to reveal a huge sea horse magically sculpted from sand and shells. Life, this beautiful image suggests, is a pattern we cannot see, except through the artist's Olympian...