The Australian actor Simon Baker has spent a good portion of his career in Hollywood, in amiable lead roles on television and mostly amiable second leads in film. He often sports a slightly unruly mop of sandy hair, which helps put across the aforementioned amiability. The now 54-year-old performer has very short-cropped hair in \u201cLimbo,\u201d the new Australian film written, directed, shot, edited and more by Ivan Sen, and he is not shy about letting Sen\u2019s camera, recording in exceptionally sharp black and white, pick up every crease and wrinkle on his tanned face. His acting here, understated, enigmatic, mindfully physical, is of a different order than I\u2019ve ever seen it. And it grounds this terse, unsettling mystery that\u2019s inextricable from the shame of not only the title town in which the story is set, but all of Australia itself.<\/p>\n
Baker plays Travis Hurley, a detective assigned to look into a twenty-year-old case in the desolate South Australian not-quite-town of Limbo. This outpost in the outback is strewn with private opal mines (a milieu also explored in the excellent 2017 \u201cStrange Colours,\u201d a film sponsored by the Biennale College) but it\u2019s not exactly a boom town. One operator we meet is the indigenous Charlie Hayes, who seems to have taken up mining as a way to exile himself from his family. Another is Joseph, a wheezing old white man whose former partner, Leon, fancied young Black girls and threw parties for the locals as a way to attract them to his, well, cave. <\/p>\n
These figures all remember Charlotte, who disappeared in the town. She was Charlie\u2019s younger sister. Another sibling, Emma, works at a desolate little caf\u00e9 and raises a couple of Charlie\u2019s kids. Hurley\u2019s arrival in the town in inauspicious. He motors in listening to motivational tapes that use Old Testament lore as a jumping off point. Referencing the visions of Joseph, the narrator warns \u201cIt is important to remember that not all dreams are necessarily from God.\u201d Shortly after Hurley checks in to the Limbo Motel, whose rooms are built out of rock, he makes himself a nice relaxing dose of heroin to shoot up. Sufficiently chilled, he stashes his gun under his mattress and gets out his vintage cassette player and listens to interrogations two decades old. <\/p>\n
Once he\u2019s out in the field, such as it is, people aren\u2019t eager to help. Charlie tells him to f*ck off at first. But on a subsequent meeting, several bottles of Eastern Grey Bitter\u2014in Limbo, even the beer names are dismal\u2014loosen him up. Eventually he lets Travis in on his bitterness. White girl disappears, he says, and it gets on the TV. The helicopters turn up. Black girl goes missing, it\u2019s swept under the rug. <\/p>\n
Travis doesn\u2019t hold out much hope for these people. He\u2019s just there to see if there\u2019s enough evidence about to warrant a re-opening of the case. If that happens, he won\u2019t even be among the officers to investigate it. But the place, and its people, assert themselves sufficiently on Travis that he develops a stronger conscience. He can only filter the sadness of this place through the sadness of his own life, which he reveals late in the picture to Emma\u2019s errant son. But it\u2019s enough to make him want to act, even as he\u2019s getting shut down by his department. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Australian actor Simon Baker has spent a good portion of his career in Hollywood, in amiable lead roles on television and mostly amiable second leads in film. He often sports a slightly unruly mop of sandy hair, which helps put across the aforementioned amiability. The now 54-year-old performer has very short-cropped hair in \u201cLimbo,\u201d …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[50,45,47,37],"class_list":["post-1238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thriller-movies","tag-crime","tag-drama","tag-mystery","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1238\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}