A good but overrated movie

I already saw this movie but since it was such a while ago, I thought I might as well check it out again. To be honest, I always had some mixed feelings about this movie. Indeed, back in those days, there was a huge buzz about this flick and, thanks to this feature, Geoffrey Rush's career finally took off (he even got an oscar for his performance) and he became afterwards a familiar face in many popular movies. It also launched the career of Scott Hicks who has been working in the US ever since even though none of his other movies have been really successful. Still, even if Geoffrey Rush was really strong, I wasn’t completely convinced by the rest of the movie. The first thing that I found rather odd was that, even though this movie was dealing with a mentally unstable man (that’s clearly an understatement), they spent actually very little time on his life following his breakdown and the time he might have spent in the psychiatric system. In fact, during the first half focusing on David Helfgott as a kid and as a young man, even though he was displayed as rather fragile, there was nothing much indicating that he was so mentally unstable. On the other hand, you could argue that the years of training and the huge amount of pressure might have eventually triggered his mentall illness. Eventually, instead of focusing on David himself and what was going on in his mind, they spent a huge amount of time arguing that his father was the bad guy in this story but that didn’t really work either. First of all, his behaviour didn’t really make sense as he first pushed his son to become a great pianist and, then, suddenly, he tried to stop him to go abroad to expand even more his career but why? Because he was jealous maybe? It was never clear and, in fact, many family members claimed that, in real life, the only reason he stopped David for going abroad was because he was actually worried about his mental health which made more sense than what was displayed in this movie. Furthermore, even if he would have been a huge pain in the ass, David eventually had his major mental breakdown when he was abroad and when his father was far away so, to constanly blame his old man was the wrong approach in my opinion. Anyway, to conclude in spite of its flaws, it was still an interesting story with a very strong performance by Geoffrey Rush and it is definitely worth a look.