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Based on the life of Raimond Gaita about his embattled migrant family in post-war Australia. It is ultimately a story of love that celebrates the unbreakable bond between father and son...

The following review is from At The Movies (ABC Australia) http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s1912077.htm

Romulus, My Father

Review by Margaret Pomeranz

Richard Roxburgh has taken on the mantle of film director with ROMULUS, MY FATHER, an adaptation of the memoirs of Raimond Gaita, who's parents Romulus, (ERIC BANA), and mother, (CHRISTINA FRANKA POTENTE), were post-war immigrants to Australia.

By 1960 they were doing it tough on a farm outside Maryborough. It was too much for Christina. She left and returned only intermittently.

For young Rai, (KODI SMIT-McPHEE), his mother’s arrivals brought joy and pain.

When Christina sets up house with another man, Mitro, (RUSSEL DYKSTRA) and has a baby young Rai is sent to live with her.

ROMULUS, MY FATHER, is told very much from young Rai's perspective and Richard Roxburgh was either very lucky or very astute to cast young KODI SMIT-McPHEE who has to bear an incredible load in this film and is so convincing apart from just a couple of moments. And both ERIC BANA and FRANKA POTENTE are excellent.

The world, the community of immigrant men without women is beautifully drawn.
And the times of the early 60's is meticulously created, the poverty of that era for so many.

But the core of the film is a child caught up in his love for both his parents, both tough relationships in many ways.

This film is another major achievement for our industry, it is ultimately a very quietly moving experience.

Further comments

MARGARET: David?

DAVID: Yes, it is and I guess you would expect that an actor who becomes a director would be wonderful with actors, and all the actors in this film are very good.

I mean, I think Eric Bana gives a really fine performance and, as you say, the boy is terrific too.

I think maybe it was a bit of a mistake, though, to put the dates on the film so very specifically.

We’re constantly being told now that it's the spring of 1960, because the boy doesn't change throughout the entire film and during that period you would have expected him to mature and change a little bit so that's just a niggly point, I know.

MARGARET: Stickler for detail, aren't you?

DAVID: Well, yes, it sort of bothered me slightly. The main problem I had with the film, though, was that its repetitiveness, I guess.

I mean it is - I know it's based on a true story but it just seemed to be a cycle that was continuing and going on, of the coming and going and returning and going back, you know the trips to the hospital and so on.

It just became just a touch monotonous for me, but I agree with you about the period and the setting and it's a very interesting subject.

MARGARET: Well, you see, I didn't find it that way at all. I thought it was really, you know, it is so much a child's vision...

DAVID: Yes.

MARGARET: ...of a troubled relationship.

DAVID: Certainly, yes.

MARGARET: And really a very depressed and ill mother and ultimately father, as well.

DAVID: Yes, indeed. Well, it's a very sad film, yes.

MARGARET: But it's - in the end it's beautiful.

DAVID: Yes.

Quick Post comment review to Margaret and David ABC

Margaret and David
I agree with some of your review of Romulus My Father,
I found it A brilliant moving film of exceptionally high quality. tremendous acting, telling a true story of love, deprivation, trauma set in the Australian bush capturing the beauty of the country side and scenery yet, true to the era it is set in. Accurately depicting the burdens facing children and young people coping with a parents mental illness.
This film deserves the highest award for its portrayal of this subject matter.
Paul Mckillop
Convener,
The National Network Of Adult and Adolescent Children who have a mentally ill parent (NNAAMI). For further info re the needs of these children see our site www.nnaami.org
July 2007

Romulus, My Father

Sydney Morning Herald
Sandra Hall, reviewer
May 26, 2007

In the cover photograph of Raimond Gaita's childhood memoir, his father, Romulus, gazes at potential readers with great suspicion. His eyes suggest an irritated hawk and it's clear that the grooves in his cheeks are anything but laugh lines.

Eric Bana seems much too wry and sunny to get under the skin of such a man but that's all right. You need a little lightness to lift the sense of quiet desperation running through Gaita's story. Only by dispelling it from time to time can you glimpse the strong vein of hope that's pulsing beneath that dour gaze.

It's a story emblematic of the immigrant experience. It's also unique - distinguished by Romulus's love for his beautiful, unstable German wife, Christina, who leaves him for his best friend yet never stops caring for him, so bringing torment to both men. Charming, restless and unable to look after herself, let alone her children, Christina is an insoluble puzzle to her son and his father. The young Raimond is never really at peace when he's with her but he's even more anxious when she's away. He will make sense of this one day. We now know that his fractured life with his parents provided the perfect incubator for his subsequent career as a moral philosopher. The proof is in his book - a collection of vividly retained memories, recounted in pellucid prose and illuminated by mature understanding.

The problems for the filmmaker lie in which memories to choose, where to start and how to reproduce the book's reflectiveness while staying inside the mind of a child. Admittedly, the film's director, the Australian actor Richard Roxburgh, has given himself a head start by finding an extraordinary Raimond in Kodi Smit-McPhee, who combines the innocence of a 10-year-old with the intuitiveness of someone who has spent several lifetimes watching the ground shift under his feet. Yet that rich vein of hope I was talking about turns out to be stubbornly elusive. Despite the prevalence of Bana's half-smile and the frequency with which it threatens to bloom into the real thing, this is a very serious picture.

The opening scene is promising enough. It's a winter's morning and Romulus is trying to revive a handful of bees that he's found lying stupefied by the cold on the grass outside his workshop. He's warming them with the gentle heat given off by a lightbulb hanging from a ceiling cord.

Raimond is watching sceptically, then one by one, they start to wriggle and fly away. "They think it's the sun," Romulus murmurs as father and son contemplate this small miracle with a mingling of joy and complicity.

Sadly, Romulus's wife, Christina - a luminous performance by the German actress Franka Potente - has also flown away. Human beings are not as easy to warm as bees and she's been chilled by the loneliness of the tiny farmhouse that the Gaitas are renting on the central Victorian plains. She's now living in town with Romulus's friend, Mitru (Russell Dykstra), another immigrant from Yugoslavia. But from time to time she pays her husband and son a visit, looking cowed by the bleached sky and seeming lost amid the broad yellow paddocks. She's at her most content when lying on her bed with Raimond while they sing or tell one another stories. Music cheers her, practicalities overwhelm her. In her presence, Raimond feels a confusion of happiness and alarm, as if he's not quite sure which of them is meant to be the parent.

In the book, Romulus and his best friend, Hora, who is also Mitru's brother, spend a lot of time discussing character - the strength of mind that pilots you safely through adversity. This is what they aspire to. What they distrust is character's slippery twin, personality. Christina has personality and so is condemned to a life of superficiality. It's a puritanical view - or it would be if Romulus stuck to it. In reality, he indulges Christina out of love and slips the struggling Mitru as much money as he can because he likes and pities him.

The book gave the film's British screenwriter, Nick Drake, no dialogue to build on and he writes elliptically, making great play of the landscape and its double-edged attractions. The plains offer freedom; encapsulated in Romulus's wild rides along the dirt roads on his motorbike and in the scenes when Raimond and Marton Csokas's gentle, steadfast Hora go boating on the glassy waters of the nearby dam.

But the emptiness of those green and yellow expanses can also be overbearing. Against them, human effort and enterprise are scaled down and diminished, which is the way it seems to Romulus and his fellow immigrants. Uprooted from their own country, they seem as if they're still in transit, forever perched in limbo.

It's a truism that fine books are hard to translate to the screen and this is an especially tough one. The film's second half is a remorseless concentration of calamities, faithfully following the course of the book. But on the page, tragedy is leavened by introspection. There's space to breathe, pause and think. The film gives you experience without analysis, intensity without relief. It's a brave and honourable attempt, bristling with character. But I can't help wishing that it had a little more personality.