MOVIE REVIEW

The luminous father-son tale, set in the Australian bush, transcends the dark times.

By Carina Chocano, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

"Romulus, My Father" is the poignant, occasionally harrowing -- though high-spirited and seemingly incandescent -- story of a young boy growing up in the Australian bush not long after the end of World War II. The high spirits come courtesy of Kodi Smit-McPhee, who plays young Raimond Gaita, the Australian philosopher on whose memoir the movie is based. The golden glow is the work of cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson, who shot the film on location in Central Victoria, Australia.

Directed by Australian actor Richard Roxburgh ("Moulin Rouge," "Van Helsing"), "Romulus, My Father" follows a small, young and presumably shellshocked immigrant family stranded in a vast place whose very calm and remoteness seem to take on a vaguely sinister cast. Eric Bana plays Rai's father Romulus, a Romanian-speaking Yugoslav married to a German, who immigrated to Australia after the war. In the summer of 1960, Rai and his father live on a homestead where Romulus works as a blacksmith and tries to raise chickens. In the opening scene, Romulus brings what appears to be a handful of dead bees back to life by gently warming them with a lantern. He looks, to Rai, like a miracle worker, and it soon becomes apparent to the rest of us that he's probably some sort of saint. Romulus' wife, Christina (Franka Potente), has left the family and gone to live in Melbourne but occasionally returns home to shake things up.

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For Rai, these reunions are happy and always unexpected, but end predictably in trouble. Romulus loves his wife and supports her financially, but it's plain to everyone (even if they'd rather not see it) that Christina is a whack job. Not that she doesn't have a point -- the scrubby, bleached-out outpost they inhabit is eons away from the places they came from, and the people who live there are too sunny and undamaged to be believed. Sweet-natured old neighbor ladies and flirtatious young women at the local soda fountain appear comical in contrast to Christina's dark menace, which Potente manages to exude from every fair pore and blond hair.

Christina's infidelities culminate, horribly, in her moving in with one of Romulus' closest friends, a Romanian fellow immigrant named Mitru (Russell Dykstra) with whom she has a daughter. Rai is forced to act as companion and helper to his struggling father and as parent, nanny and nursemaid to his depressed, irresponsible mother, who shows even less interest in her second child than in her first.

But Christina has always been this way, and eventually young Rai learns to protect himself from her intrusions. He has no such defenses in place for when Romulus suffers a nervous breakdown of his own. It all sounds bleak, but it's not. The tragedies of Rai's young life are punctuated with scenes of bucolic splendor and sudden discovery, and Smit-McPhee and Bana have an easy rapport that radiates devotion and mutual respect. For all its sad moments, "Romulus, My Father" is a love story between father and son kept aloft by unalloyed admiration.

carina.chocano@latimes.com

"Romulus My Father." MPAA rating: R for sexuality, some violence and brief language. Running time: 1 hour, 49 minutes. Exclusively at Laemmle's Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-9741.