Hilary and Jackie: Movie, DVD Review (2008)

Directed by Anand Tucker, written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, based on the book “A Genius in the Family,” by Hilary and Piers du Pre, 121 minutes, rated R.

Anand Tucker’s “Hilary and Jackie” puts a bright face to genius, darkens it with madness and then destroys it forever with illness.

The film--gorgeously shot and beautifully told--is an unflinching, uncompromising, unsettling look at the famous cellist Jacqueline du Pre (Emily Watson), who rose to fame in the 1960s while her sister, Hilary (Rachel Griffiths), a talented flutist, was forced to turn her back to the stage and give herself over to marriage and family.

Fate, it seems, was kinder to Hilary, who wrote the film’s source book, “A Genius in the Family,” with her brother Piers (played in the film by Rupert Penry Jones). As a child, it was Hilary, not Jackie, who was the first star of the du Pre family. It was she who received the awards, the accolades from her parents, the broad attention for her musical gifts. But as this complex, sensitive and very well-acted film explores, Jackie was not to be outdone by her older sister, whom she adored with a fierceness that sometimes gave way to great bouts of rivalry.

Consumed by competitiveness and the need to eclipse her sister, Jackie pushed herself relentlessly, eventually achieving meteoric success as one of the world’s greatest musicians.

Her marriage to pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim (James Frain) only heightened her appeal, making her half of a handsome, superstar couple that toured the world.

Lofted throughout by du Pre’s signature piece, Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor, the film explores how Jackie’s hard push for success wasn’t worth it, that it only created loneliness and drove her to emotional despair.

Just as in “Amadeus” and in “Shine,” “Hilary and Jackie” understands the strength and fragility of the artist. It knows that madness is sometimes brimming just beneath the surface of artistic creation, and that it was partly this madness, coupled with her struggle with multiple sclerosis, that caused Jackie to damage what never should have been damaged: the relationship with her sister.

Indeed, when Jackie tells Hilary in one particularly bitchy scene that there’s nothing at all special about her, Hilary’s response, measured and leveling, seems coolly justified: “If you think for one moment that being an ordinary person is any easier than being an extraordinary one,” she says to Jackie, “you’re wrong. If you didn’t have that cello to prop you up, you’d be nothing.”

Such devoted sisters have rarely been this beguiling.

Grade: A-

(Originally published 1999)