Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett have consistently cemented their status as two of the most respectable actors in the industry, actors who tend to carry the responsibility of heavy material with aplomb. It isn’t often that we see them in roles that make them be a tad quirky or potentially silly, hence why it’s surprising to see them do projects like The Lego Batman Movie or Borderlands, respectively. But that wasn’t always the case, as back when they were both still building up their resumes, they teamed up for a spirited yarn called Oscar and Lucinda, director Gillian Armstrong‘s follow-up to her successful Little Women adaptation. Armstrong found ideal protagonists for her storytelling fixations in these two outsiders who cross each other’s paths and find a way towards success and fulfillment in each other and their unique shared passion: cards.
What Is ‘Oscar and Lucinda’ About?
Oscar (Fiennes) is an Anglican priest who is traveling to study to be a higher-level member of the church. On his travels, he discovers gambling and card-playing, euphorically embracing the thrill of it as a form of spiritual liberation. Lucinda (Blanchett) is an Australian entrepreneur trying to get a glassmaking business started, who finds gambling an exciting way to make money. The two cross paths while traveling across the sea, when Lucinda feels a need to confess her “sin” of gambling to Oscar, but he convinces her that gambling is actually very cool and justified, which she’s swayed by. Their partnership inspires them to bet all their money on a masterpiece: making a full-sized glass church as a gift for their shared mentor, Reverend Hasset (Ciarán Hinds). Their ultimate gamble takes them to places that veer all over the tonal map, from the highs of aspirational buddy comedies and sports movie montages to the lows of vicious human brutality and social ostracization.
Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett Are a Winning Pair of Dreamers
While the film technically is stuffed with plot details and has the sweep of an old-school romantic epic, it still largely relies on the chemistry between Fiennes and Blanchett to work. They have to seem instantly perfect for each other, but also too focused on their life goals to even notice any romantic sparks, and also share a unified passion without seeming like the same person copied twice.Fiennes turns Oscar into a lovable kook, with a shock of red bedhead hair and a rabid passion that borders on the delusional, consumed by an obsession with an Ace card.
Blanchett has Lucinda be the more measured of the two, with more of an eye on the bigger picture, the dreamer lying on the grass with her eyes on the stars, resolute and determined. They’re not quite full yin-and-yang opposites, but they perfectly supply what the other person needs, with Lucinda’s grounding focus and Oscar’s dogged belief in themselves keeping them afloat through the hardest trials they endure both together and separately. Even as Oscar becomes rejected from mainstream society because of his gambling addiction or as Lucinda questions the likelihood of their building the glass church, they always come back to each other, and that’s enough for them.
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‘Oscar and Lucinda’ Defies Easy Categorization
Despite its penchant for frivolity and the headlong rush of bliss, Oscar and Lucinda remains soberingly dense in its consideration of the larger complications that the dynamic between Oscar and Lucinda inspires. On a more obvious level, Lucinda is a woman trying to start her own artistic business, and her competency in that field is usually questioned by people that aren’t Oscar or Reverend Hassett. Meanwhile, Oscar is thrown away by society as a degenerate loser simply because of his gambling fixation, and we aren’t really shown if his behavior truly became unhinged or if that was a puritan mindset using that as an excuse.
On a larger front, their shared philosophy directly confronts the widely held societal norms of the time, in that they’re a straight man and woman in a committed partnership that isn’t built around romance and finds their salvation in something widely considered a sin. Plus, this isn’t a case of them turning to a “sin” out of a lack of options or pure survival instincts, they thoroughly enjoy gambling and what it brings them, in a way that makes them feel more like the people they want to be. By conventional religious wisdom, that’s a cause for celebration, but in the social world they must exist in, it indirectly leads to a near ruination of everything they’ve painstakingly built. How exactly that ruination comes about is up for you to discover, as Oscar and Lucinda is a film that should be rediscovered by people, for no other reason than as a time capsule from before Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett became properly packaged by Hollywood.
Oscar and Lucinda is available to rent or buy on Apple TV+ in the U.S.
Oscar and Lucinda
- Release Date
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December 31, 1997
- Runtime
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132 minutes
- Director
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Gillian Armstrong
- Writers
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Laura Jones
- Producers
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Robin Dalton
