Good acting and some very good scenes don’t quite add up to a good film in noted Australian director Fred Schepisi’s often confusing adaptation of a sprawling novel by his country’s only Nobel Prize novelist, Patrick White.
It’s 1972 in a suburb of Sydney, where Elizabeth (Charlotte Rampling), a monstrously vain and bitchy widowed socialite, is bedridden in her mansion, awaiting death following a stroke or two.
Jetting in for the deathwatch are her two long-absent and disaffected middle-aged children. Basil (Geoffrey Rush) is a never-married, knighted actor whose career in London is fading. His sister Dorothy (Judy Davis) is the impoverished widow of a French prince.
Also with eyes on an inheritance are Elizabeth’s overly devoted lawyer-lover (John Gaden) and her loyal staff, who are aghast at the kids’ plans to shove her into a nursing home.
Saucy nurse Flora (Alexandra Schepisi, the director’s daughter, who comes close to stealing the movie) aims to seduce Basil. I couldn’t quite work out the relationship between Elizabeth and her Holocaust-survivor cook Lotte (Helen Morse), who performs Weimar cabaret tunes.
“The Eye of the Storm’’ has wonderful moments, as when the siblings retreat to their childhood summer home to escape their dying mom’s still-withering put-downs. But who are those people living there now? And wasn’t that house destroyed in the titular storm depicted in a flashback? It all feels like a whittled-down miniseries.