By Coral Gables Gazette staff
Less than seven weeks after the death of actor Sam Neill, the Coral Gables Art Cinema will bring one of his most acclaimed films back to the big screen Saturday in a newly restored 4K presentation.
Jane Campion’s 1993 drama “The Piano” screens once, at 2:30 p.m. Aug. 29, as part of the cinema’s Special Presentations series. The restoration arrives during a summer theatrical rerelease of the film and offers another chance to see Neill in a role far removed from the blockbuster scientist he played in “Jurassic Park” that same year.
Neill, who died July 13 at age 78, plays Alisdair Stewart, a landowner in colonial New Zealand awaiting the arrival of Ada McGrath, the woman he has arranged to marry, and her young daughter, Flora.
Ada, played by Holly Hunter, has not spoken since childhood and communicates partly through her cherished piano. When Stewart refuses to transport the instrument from the beach where Ada and Flora arrive, it eventually comes into the possession of his neighbor George Baines, played by Harvey Keitel.
What follows is the unsettling bargain at the heart of the film: Baines offers Ada a way to earn the piano back, key by key, through increasingly intimate encounters while she plays.
Anna Paquin, then 11, plays Flora.
The film became one of the defining works of Campion’s career. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1993 and shared the Palme d’Or with Chen Kaige’s “Farewell My Concubine,” making Campion the first woman to win Cannes’ top prize.
“The Piano” then earned eight Academy Award nominations and won three: Best Actress for Hunter, Best Supporting Actress for Paquin and Best Original Screenplay for Campion. Paquin remains among the youngest performers ever to win a competitive Oscar.
Neill’s performance occupied a different corner of the actor’s unusually broad career.
The New Zealand actor could move between Hollywood spectacle and intimate drama with little apparent difficulty. In 1993 alone, moviegoers saw him as paleontologist Alan Grant fleeing dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” and as the rigid, increasingly desperate Stewart in Campion’s Gothic romance.
Neill’s career stretched across more than five decades and included “My Brilliant Career,” “Dead Calm,” “A Cry in the Dark,” “The Hunt for Red October,” “Peaky Blinders” and “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” along with multiple returns to the “Jurassic Park” franchise.
His death in July came only months after he had announced that he was cancer-free following treatment for blood cancer.
A new look at a 1993 landmark
Saturday’s screening is not simply a repertory showing of an older print.
Sony Pictures Classics is returning “The Piano” to theaters in a new 4K restoration created from the original 35mm image negative. Campion and original cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh supervised and approved the restoration and color grading.
The original negative was scanned in 4K at Australia’s Fixafilm laboratory, while a 35mm print held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences served as a visual reference. The original 5.1-channel audio was also remastered.
For a film whose reputation rests partly on Dryburgh’s images of rain, mud, dense New Zealand bush and the piano sitting improbably against an open shoreline, the restoration gives the visual element unusual importance.
Campion’s film has endured for more than its awards. Its treatment of desire, repression, power and autonomy was provocative in 1993 and remains uncomfortable by design. Ada’s silence does not leave her passive. Much of the film turns instead on the ways she finds to assert control in a world in which the men around her repeatedly attempt to exercise it for her.
Michael Nyman’s piano-driven score, meanwhile, became almost inseparable from the film’s identity.
Coral Gables Art Cinema lists Saturday’s presentation as a one-time screening, with no additional showtimes currently scheduled.
For South Florida audiences, it is an opportunity to revisit one of the films that established Campion internationally and one of the performances that demonstrated how much more there was to Sam Neill than the role that made him a Hollywood star.
If you go…
“The Piano”
Saturday, Aug. 29, 2:30 p.m.
Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables
1993, rated R, 121 minutes
Tickets: $8 for members; $11.75 for nonmembers
Tickets and information: gablescinema.com
