That’s largely due to the story it tells and the characters it portrays. Yet despite all these good things, watching “Eye of the Storm” feels more like an obligation than a pleasure more often than it should. His screenwriter of choice is Judy Morris, whose credits include the very different “Happy Feet” and “Babe, Pig in the City” working with another standout Australian director, George Miller.Īs for the actors, with Geoffrey Rush, Charlotte Rampling and Judy Davis in the starring roles and able support from gifted veterans across the board, the cast really couldn’t be improved on.

Shepherding the task of bringing the book to the screen is the veteran director Fred Schepisi, whose “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith” was a key film in the Australian film renaissance of the 1970s. “Eye of the Storm” is based on a massive, 600-plus page novel by the celebrated Australian writer Patrick White, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973, the same year this savage tale of the psychological horrors family members inflict on one another was published. The results are off-and-on impressive, but the project’s ambitions turn out to be greater than its ability to achieve them. With impeccable source material and a talented creative team'ENMV0002398'>'ENMV0002398'>, “The Eye of the Storm'is an ambitious stab at what might be called the Great Australian Film.

Eye of the storm story