David Denby

The Chamberlains were Seventh Day Adventists . . . Though grief-stricken in private, they spoke publicly of accepting God's will and of seeing Azaria at the Second Coming. They were naive [two dots over "i" in "naive"]: Attempting to use the media to explain their faith, they appeared to be boasting of their serenity. Their piety might have been the only way to keep their feelings under control, but the mdeia and the public despised them for not breaking down and crying. . . .

The Chamberlains were victims of media sensationalism and prejudice. But victims or not, they are a strange, dicey pair to put at the center of a movie. To my eyes, at least, they are dim and unappealing. As Lindy, Meryl Streep wears a moplike black wig and witchy eyebrows that arch down toward the bridge of her nose. Streep coarsens her voice and purses her lips. She makes Lindy spiky, sarcastic, perhaps too proud of her lucid habits of mind; Lindy is frightening when she coldly describes on television what a hungry dingo could do to a baby--her baby. Streep, clearly, decided that her integrity lay in making Lindy as difficult to like as possible, and Sam Neill, matching her, gives a performance almost masochistic in its devotion to Michael Chamberlain's mediocrity. . . .

The Chamberlains are people of little imagination, and, if Schepisi is right, they never attained much insight into the sources of the hostility they evoked. This failure doesn't affect their innocence, of course, but I'm not sure that the public's initial distaste for them (later on, they found supporters) was purely an example of prejudice. Putting it brutally, if thse two had ever read or thought about anything but the Bible, they might have found some bette way of speaking and acting after Azalea died. There is something creepy about them. The movie argues that dislikable people deserve tolerance and respect, too, and we register the point, but it's a hollow victory for tolerance. If Schepisi had veen less of a moralist and more of an artist, he would have discovered something else in the Chamberlains--depths in their suffering--and the whole issue of whether we like them would have been beside the point.”

David Denby
New York, November 28, 1988
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