by JOANNE LATIMER

The screenplay certainly had legs. Michael Petroni’s script for Till Human Voices Wake Us won both the American Film Institute’s Screenplay of the Year and the WGA/Scenario Magazine Award for the Best New Screenplay of 1996. Petroni got to direct his winning script - which is described as "based on an original idea," wanting it to be true. But it doesn’t come off as original. Our imaginations stay 10 minutes ahead of the action.

If the script was so hot, why is the film so bloody boring? Once the novelty of seeing Memento’s Guy Pearce play opposite an amnesiac loses its cachet, we tuck in for his long journey into grief and forgiveness. You see, his dad died back home in small town Australia, where he grew up without much emotional warmth and an absent mother. Now Pearce is a shrink who specializes in memory (cue the Memento jokes).

On the train trip home for his dad’s funeral, Pearce meets a mysterious woman played by Helena Bonham Carter, who seems to have lost her own memory, but she remembers a lot about Pearce’s boyhood love, Sylvy (Brooke Harmon). The film starts to swerve toward magic realism, as we comprehend the possibility that Bonham Carter could be Sylvy, or the daughter of the crazy old lady in the woods near Sylvy’s house, or maybe just a loony stalker. To further the confusion, Bonham Carter’s accent is all over the place, sometimes English, occasionally Aussie.

Flashbacks between the young Pearce and his girlfriend don’t sound natural, as they talk like shy philosophers about the moon, stars, water, dreams and quasi-existential stuff. It sounds more like dialogue an adult scriptwriter wished he’d had with his first girlfriend. The sexual tension between the kids mounts, slowly, until a tragedy occurs that cuts off Pearce from his emotions forever. Will the mystery woman reveal herself and help him shoulder some pain? We hardly care, having easily guessed her identity and purpose. The human voices woke us too early. :

Till Human Voices Wake Us opens Friday, March 7

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