Don't bother with Tom White

Who's "Tom White", you ask? It's a new Australian film, starring Colin Friels as the eponymous charachter. Tom escapes his draftman's job at a develpment company making soulless suburban housing estates (he works on "Clearwater Springs" estate - built on a garbage tip). He's obviously "cracked" in some way, and embarks on a life as a homeless person.

I found the main character believable enough, but the way the story is told is disjointed, and we're exposed to a bunch of unrelated people that he meets on the streets. Very little is made of his former life, even though we keep getting flashes of what his wife and kids are up to. There seems to be great potential for exporing the relationship to ever-expanding suburbia - but it's never explored. (For me the best thing about the whole film is the drawing his wife finds of the "Clearwater Springs birdfeeder".)

The cimematography and editing are competent, but uninspired. But, despite my well-known capacity for "European pacing", I got bored (and it's only 106 min). I found the cyclic experience devices to be contrived, and the "resolution" to be unsatisfactory. If the goal of the film is to give one empathy with the lifestyle of the homeless (alienation, grabbing human interaction incedentally and discontinuously, boredom, disconnection from society) then the goal was achieved.... but I think a worthier goal would be to give the viewer an appreciation of this state of existence, not a common experience with those in it.