Opal Dream (2006) User Reviews

Story of reconciliation

[nevadaluke · 6/10 · 9 June 2008]

Screened on DVD June 8, 2008

It's a warm holiday season in the South Australia mining town of Coober Pedy, and for the Williamson family, festivities are juggled around nine-year-old Kellyanne's devotion to her invisible playmates, Pobby and Dingan, and her dad, Rex's, single-minded pursuit of the perfect opal.

The hypnotic gems possess a dangerous allure, as the girl's brother, Ashmol, says in his framing narration to "Opal Dream." Everybody comes to the place to dream -- presumably about a better life somewhere -- as they dig for opals. The more you dream, the deeper you want to dig, but if you dig too deep, you might never get out -- never wake up, he says.

For the Williamsons, the town offers dreams and not much else. Rex hopes to strike it rich for his wife, Annie, and their kids. But after a year in town, they don't have much. Rex needs a bit of luck at the races to afford the kids' Christmas presents.

Moving to Coober Pedy has taken the hardest toll on Kellyanne, for whom Pobby and Dingan are two very real people, and she shares with everyone her enthusiasm for her friends' artistic, gentle, natures. "They're pacifists," she explains.

Her teacher says Kellyanne has a vivid imagination but she's a dreamer who doesn't have many friends -- "she doesn't find people very easy." When Rex complains about Pobby and Dingan, Annie points out that they're as real as opals are to him.

Rex has his share of more tangible problems. He has relocated after an apparently minor brush with the law, and he finds himself in a community of narrow-minded ruffians who don't coddle to "ratters" -- blokes that come around at night and noodle around your claim for highly prized colored opals.

Adapted from a Ben Rice novel, "Pobby and Dingan," the movie "Opal Dream" is the story of Rex's reconciliation with his new town and his growing family as two crises unfold.

It all starts off innocently. In a clumsy but well-meaning attempt to wean his daughter off Pobby and Dingan, Rex offers to take the amorphous pair along to the mines with him and Ashmol while she and Mom go to a holiday party. Kellyanne agrees, but when he comes home without her unseen sidekicks, Kellyanne talks him into going back to look for them. When he does, the bloke at a nearby mine discovers Rex on his claim and calls the cops.

Rex is soon headed to a hearing to face mining violation charges. Worse, the whole town turns on the family: Annie loses her job at a grocery store and, when Ashmol goes for a bike ride, he finds a rat swinging from the handlebars left by a gang of jeering kids. Again, Kellyanne gets the worst of it -- without Pobby and Dingan around, she falls ill and, to the bafflement of her doctors, steadily deteriorates.

The way the reconciliation is achieved carries the story satisfactorily through Act III. But the climax and resolution are squeezed together so tightly that the outcome for all the characters can only be described as ambiguous, especially for poor Kellyanne, whose actions were only the metaphor for her family's isolation.

Director Peter Cattaneo's production has an outstanding cast throughout, particularly the Williamson clan. Production values are excellent. Newcomer Sapphire Boyce is a strikingly beautiful child.

The Land of Make-Believe

[JamesHitchcock · 7/10 · 20 March 2008]

The Australian film industry has over the last few decades produced a number of haunting, poetic films, quite different from the standard Hollywood output. Examples include "Walkabout", "Picnic at Hanging Rock", the lesser-known but excellent "Celia" and the more recent "Ten Canoes". "Opal Dream" is another in this tradition; as in "Celia" the main character is a nine-year-old girl.

The film is set in the opal mining town of Coober Pedy, here disguised under the fictitious name of Lightning Ridge, and centres on the family of opal miner Rex Williamson. Some on this board have labelled the family "dysfunctional", but this does not seem an accurate description. Rex and his wife Annie are loving and affectionate parents to their children Ashmol and Kellyanne, and Ashmol seems a normal, likable eleven-year-old lad. The problem lies with his younger sister Kellyanne, a shy, withdrawn child who finds it difficult to make friends. To compensate for her lack of playmates she has invented two imaginary friends, Pobby (male) and Dingan (female).

Many children go through a phase of having an imaginary friend- I remember my younger sister inventing a boy called John Ted- but Kellyanne's case is rather different. Even at the age of five or six my sister was well aware in her heart of hearts that John Ted was a fantasy rather than a real person, and by the time she was nine he had long been forgotten. Kellyanne, however, has quite convinced herself that Pobby and Dingan are real, and has retained her belief in the reality of their existence long after most children have waved their imaginary friends goodbye.

Rex and Annie are concerned about their daughter's fantasies, but pretend to believe in the existence of Pobby and Dingan to humour her, and one day Rex pretends to take them to his opal diggings. When he returns, however, Kellyanne becomes convinced that he has left them behind and insists that he take her back to look for them. Rex does so, but while looking for the imaginary pair he inadvertently strays onto another miner's claim, which leads to him being arrested by the police and charged with "ratting" (illegal mining). As ratting is regarded as the most heinous sin an opal miner can commit, this leads to Rex and his family being ostracised by their neighbours. Kellyanne falls ill, partly because of stress caused by the family's situation and partly because of grief over the loss of her friends.

There are parallels between Kellyanne's situation and that of her parents and the wider community of Lightning Ridge. She is living in a world of make-believe and so, in a sense, are they. The opal miners are not employed by a big mining corporation, but are self-employed prospectors. Each miner has his own jealously guarded individual claim, which explains why "ratters" are regarded with such contempt. They have been lured to the town by dreams of wealth, but in most cases these prove to be as illusory as Pobby and Dingan. (Hence the title "Opal Dream"). Until about a year previously, Rex and Annie ran a pub in Melbourne, but abandoned that life to try their luck in the opal fields. The fact that the Williamsons are outsiders makes many of their neighbours ill-disposed to them even before the "ratting" allegations, and there is a suggestion that Kellyanne's emotional problems may be connected to her sudden uprooting from one environment to another.

I did not like the ending, which I felt amounted to a retreat into tear-jerking sentimentality and avoided, rather than resolving, the tensions and conflicts inherent in the plot. That, however, would be my only complaint. The adults all play their parts well, and the two child actors, Christian Byers and Sapphire Boyce, were excellent. Sapphire (interesting that the leading actress in a film about jewel mining should herself be named after a jewel) deserves a special mention. Most excellent performances from child actors come in films where they are required to play lively, outgoing youngsters- a good recent example is Anna Sophia Robb's performance in "Bridge to Terabithia", a film I did not otherwise much care for. To have played an introverted, withdrawn child like Kellyanne must have been more difficult. The film's haunting atmosphere is also heightened by the photography of the South Australian desert landscapes, made to seem even more barren and otherworldly by the slagheaps from the mineral workings. "Opal Dream" is very enjoyable as a sensitive and poetic exploration of a difficult childhood. 7/10

Contrasts immaturity&prejudice in adults with innocence, despite typical-character usage.

[welshnew50 · 7/10 · 25 July 2019]

This film has despite ending up portraying a scene we've seen many times in Aussie films, and despite using a few simplifying methods in writing, to draw attention away from the adults, perhaps too much upon the 2 main child-characters,..

...managed to use the limited-scope and constrained reasons of the adult-characters choices in-amongst the plot, deliberately,..

...to then focus upon, a contrasting of innocent-immaturity or no-harm-done-immaturity with adult-immaturities, and denial, and evasion, with particular worthy-targeting of our dismissive bad-habits when it comes to estimating necessity.

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When people grow up amongst different necessity when seeing-life-and-death-go-by,.. they sometimes gain wisdom from it, however, also, they sometimes end up shallow, and un-worldly, and insular, and recalcitrant.

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not allowing this story/book?/script ... to be dominated by adult-resolve, allowed both 1, the charm of the focus upon the small-world-of-trust between the two main children, and 2, the giant, almost, human world beyond the walls and fences,..

...to remain consistently-different throughout, even when one's nostalgia or setting-aside-RL suspension-of-reality, is brought depressingly-back,.. to things like the 'single-light-bulb kitchen' , we've seen too many times, per guilt of services-neglect, or house/hold/home-creation-failure despair.

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That allows for the adult reasonings, to be not ... sidelined,.. but ... KEPT in the background,.. theatrically - which i have to applaud, both in terms of us back in RL ... needing to get-beyond, evolve-out,.. of, things like shallow insularism and recalcitrance, (which emotionally, has a immature emotional part, or sometimes can, when perhaps only appearing to be a 'fully-considered-opinion', whatever that means.

( Awareness of something being outside your ability to asses, what is or is not, 'fully' ... considered, is no excuse for saying you necessarily-know, rather than simply ; can't. Honesty? or false-confidence. CHOOSE. )

yeah yeah, who's this film-critic, and why's he dissing out-back culture? not as simple as that mate, give what i'm saying a chance.

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Also, it does quite well to limit the number of social-interactions in the scenes, presumably from the original writing, when in often bleak, empty space out-back, there is a lot of time-inbetween, time-together, and people 'either take the time' to think inbetween the last time you saw ____, when then that time is precious, OR, they fail -

and despite this one being one with the dad falling into the latter category, ( potentially a aggressive checks-who's-home more than he needs to / paranoid, type )...

... it does well to deliberately reject many choices of potentially dominating adult characters, and instead uses the stunted adult characters, to make the plot not too complicated for different ages to be able to follow it, but also to highlight what is wrong in the decision making of practically the whole town during that magistrate's court scene, and what all the supposedly-adult, adults, are missing in terms of understanding the dad's choices, or then also, what the consequences of a Kangaroo-court can be, in terms of MEMORY.

Just a film-snob from the city now, eh?

This film is not just a feel-good non-reality fantasy, when fantasies have to be SOMEwhere, in reality. Reality consists of both fantasy, and what we erroneously call reality in contrast-to, fantasy,.. when it's undeniable that even fantasies, must exist in reality someWHERE.

That parallel reality, is quite well contrasted in terms of the memory of the adults, except for say the Doctor initially, although this film also does not waste too much time on it being a medical tortured-artist-in-a-mansion painting paintings you can't appreciate, yawn-fest.

Not like that - instead, the hands-on so-to-speak, USE, of the reliability and consistency of imagination itself, used by the son character, defeating the only-this!!-needs-to-be-considered defaulting-behaviour of most of the town in the court scene,..

...steps-into the spaces not-occupied by empty-space relying,.. cops'll always be too far away supposedly mature 'adults',.. ...steps-UP, into this space in the disjointed, socially-neglected, even by his own dad,.. VOID ...

... in a little bit of stretched-reality, but still mostly simultaneously-present-in-reality , reality,

and also,.. triumphs over the only physical-needs neglect also highly characterised and maybe stereotyped remaining-few wishing to only focus on the immaturity of the dad, while being unaware of the Doctor's and magistrate's reasons, to recognise the non-physical, unknowns.

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The end of it is almost far less important than much of the build-up / middle, and also, not everything leads toward or branches out of the hero-boy's moment in court - the persistence of out-back decision making, is consistent,..

...espeically since things like the differences between 1, the casual-ity with which a bunch of boys find or kill an animal for nothing more than metaphoric insult/prank ... and 2, the choice to value the fragility in the daughter,

...is something that one may or may not care about, but is at least honestly,..

...openly PORTRAYED, in unambiguous abuse/neglect / CHOICE.

Since many who might think that only one side of reasoning when it comes to animals out-back, is either-or , of ; respect/no-human-higher-deservednesses , or , the simplification of humans-first.

WERE it as simple as that, most of the town would not have turned up to a even less with rights, or being even less worthy than an animal,.. imaginary construct, in the naive/forlorn hope, that caring for it,

...will somehow cause a miracle, etc.

So, WERE all decisions and values in the bush, as simple as human-priorities / pragmatisms-at-first-glance, first-reckoning, etc,..

...the INdirect, of their then, star-trek-irrational, reasons-to, would not be parallel, with being honest enough to say you don't know, rather than do necessarily-only-one-way all the time.

But it is parallel - and so the non-physical, the unknowns of the non-physical, are Pandora's-Box-like opened up when with little choice anyway,.. no alternative to facing the reality of unknowns, being available for them, TO AVOID facing the realities that will come upon them just as much as the imaginary-figures deaths, and by-extension also, the only in a single scene real dead, whatever it was, that the group of boys tied to the main character's bike. Surely a dead rat or possum, or whatever else it was,.. is MORE REAL, than imaginary character, in other words. The directors, were not afraid of portraying that irony/hypocriticality.

The being brought-DOWN, to something far far less than a human, inevitability, is quite well matched-with purpose, of their acceptance, OF, the unknown - they accept, that they can't-know, if-it-would-not,.. help her, simply - so it might, so they gamble on it.

Wanting no-more phosphorous from-birds pollination-gamblers, have gambled on less.

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One sometimes has had no chance, when assuming no-value in things outside what you've taken into consideration when something is outside your EXPERIENCE, ( like ( less-phosphorous ) pollinators) so this film, chooses a very worthy path of valuing the seemingly valueless -

which say for instance, could easily be applied to a bit of biology, to point out the difference between a tree-dwelling pollinator / dead-branches maintainer, and by contrast,.. a omnivorous does sometimes eat rotting-flesh, plague-carrying, or gets-under-the-bathroom rodents.

Two very different things. Who were the town-'defenders' ... proudly demonstrating how quick bush-'readiness' or -'preparedness' is?

can be, in that moment? to the, nothing-but-a film-critic snob from the city?

children.

There were almost NO adults,.. psycho-social-developmentally,.. most were childish / extended-adolescents,.. in adult-form or otherwise, in this film,.. the doctor and magistrate,..

... not-many - so that neglected out-back ... that,.. this-is-what-we've-got-to-work-with expectation ... was maintained all the way through quite well.

• the film both allows for HOW, not-to, act, on things you value,..

to 1, be a failing of almost everyone, but also 2, manages to correctly set choices of things-to... but in a CONSISTENT childish or extended-adolescent HOW-TO way ...

... which creates a sense of everyone being insufficient / slap-dash / the-best-that-you-can-be ... inside. Yet that is too easy an answer, when it comes to some things.

80 years rather than 60 years, still isn't much skin-kickers. We're not there yet. Prefer birds? care-factor-zero. claw-holes in branches, get infected. 'Rat's not having claws keeps you cool in summer, assuming you've got the balls to fire off a few rounds to keep the birds away. Aim's no good? then you're fodder. Move it, trenchman - you don't deserve to be a digger.

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Watch these keeping the only-a-little differences in mind compared with some future far-far away, where consistencies like the cops'll always be too far away is no longer the norm, say with invasive-tech ... and you MIGHT, learn, what to stop doing, socially.

Even tho, how much you are to blame, for your fragmented, disjointed social spaces, is debatable.

You're still not off the hook entirely. Still not ONLY, everyone else, to blame.

Heartwarming family movie about imaginary friends

[ridleyrules · 9/10 · 29 January 2006]

I saw this movie at the 2006 International Film Festival of Rotterdam.

Heartwarming family movie about imaginary friends.

The 9 year old daughter of a family in an opal mining town enjoys company of two imaginary friends. She becomes ill after something happens to them. The father is suspected of theft, making his household outcasts in the rough Australian mining community. The older brother has always felt embarrassed of his sister's behavior, but decides to help her anyway.

Movie manages to make the audience both laugh and care about its subject "imaginary friends". Very entertaining, Excellent performances from the child actors. Recommended.

9/10

Credits Trivia: The story is based on the book "Pobby and Dingan" (2000) by UK-based author Ben Rice. Pobby and Dingan are the names of the imaginary friends. I just happened to run into this little 100 page book a week after seeing the movie.

Really good family movie

[yusufpiskin · 5/10 · 17 August 2020]

Why do I love this movie so much? I don't really know...I guess from a critics perspective it's not perfect, but for me it's one of those films I fall back on when I really couldn't be bothered with anything else and I need something to cheer up my day. It also manages to capture the rural side of Australia so well. You really feel the warm summer nights in Australia whilst watching this. Young lead Christian Byers was such a likeable kid as well. Where have all these smaller Aussie gems disappeared to? It seems no ones making them here anymore.

a quieter and deeper Full Monty

[cnewf · 9/10 · 18 July 2006]

This is quite a good film about a sun-scorched prospector town and family members whose dreams and imaginary worlds drive each other nuts. It's deeper than the director's best-known film, The Full Monty, though the topic is similar: the struggles of working-class folks to stay closer to their dreams than they are to their failures. The depiction of the town dynamics seemed to me as flawless as the individual performances, and as someone who comes from a family with shall we say a non-standard member, I was impressed with the film's ability to produce a familiar emotional mix of exasperation, devotion, and desire for a truly imaginative cure for the main problem. The movie delivers on this last point. It would be wrong to see this as a chick flick, because as in The Full Monty the cast and crew are interested in men who try to figure out how to resolve conflicts and fix disasters without using anger and force, and who pretty much succeed. British and Commonwealth film is generally better than American at avoiding stereotypes of blue-collar masculinity and this is a particularly good and heart- warming example. The boy in the picture, who has to figure out what to do about his dad and his sister, is one of the great kids of recent film history.

This fantastic movie deserves a bigger audience!

[SusieSalmonLikeTheFish · 10/10 · 18 January 2015]

Most of the people I know here in Canada have never even heard of Opal Dream, A.K.A. Pobby and Dingan. One night while they were out watching another pathetic rerun of that disgusting Family Guy show, I went on eBay and bought a DVD of Opal Dream. When it arrived in the mail two weeks later it seemed to be a movie for little children, but as innocent as it seems, it's still got a quality to it that can be just as powerful for adults as for kids.

Set in the great outback of Australia, Opal Dream is the story of the love between a little girl and her two best friends... whom no one else can see. Pobby and Dingan are imaginary friends, and very friendly and caring creatures. Her parents, teacher and brother try to understand Kellyanne's friendship by telling themselves that it's just a phase, that she'll grow out of it, that they're just emotional support for her since the family moved out to Coober Pedy for her dad's mining job, but one day they get fed up with her imaginary friends and force Kellyanne to lose them. In turn, they all learn just how powerful imagination can be, and the only one who seems to be able to finally try to set things right for Kellyanne is her brother Ashmol, and by the time the adults in town finally wake up and start seeing things from Kellyanne's point of view, it may already be too late.

I'm not really sure of the theme of Opal Dream, or even if it has one. My best guess would be that it is trying to show how when a child, or anyone for that matter, loses something important to them, it can have irreversible effects. When it comes to imaginary friends, modern media has made them out to be monsters and signs of mental illness, from the 1978 horror movie Magic to the recent 2012 movie Imaginary friend. It's rather unfortunate that today anyone who has an imaginary friend is viewed as having some sort of trouble, because for some people an imaginary friend is their support, their coping mechanism and the only one they can trust. Believe it or not many adults have them, and these people are still normal, happy members of society. Kellyanne's parents were worried that their daughter was getting to old for her unseen companions. They got their peace of mind, but Kellyanne got cheated out of her childhood.

This movie is surprisingly sad for a children's movie, I won't ruin what happens at the ending but it's incredibly depressing and will leave a lasting memory, that's for sure. The Australian scenery is very beautiful and the acting was excellent. I liked the soundtrack and the whole movie had vague elements of Paperhouse (1988) and Don't Look Under the Bed (1999). Sadly most kids today only want to watch cr*p like The Hunger Games and Disney's Frozen, so it's nice to see that there are still good movies out there for kids if you know where to look. My little brother loved this one too, but because of the ending of the film, you may want to watch t yourself before showing it to your kids. I think it deserves a 10/10 stars, even more than that, it's a beautiful movie with a timeless message and will definitely be one of my favorites for a long time to come.

haunting

[[e-mail] · 10/10 · 12 April 2013]

A hauntingly beautiful Australian film about the power of belief, and of the love between siblings. Rex Williamson (Vince Colosimo) is an opal miner prospecting in the outback town of Cooper Pedy. When his daughter Kellyanne's (Sapphire Boyce) imaginary friends go missing after a visit to the family's mine claim, he searches for them, and gets accused of attempted theft from a neighbouring claim in the process. Faced with his father being charged with attempting to steal from someone else's claim, and the family being shunned by the community as a result, as well as his young sister becoming ill through grief for her imaginary friends, Rex's son Ashmol (Christian Byers) sets out to put things right. This review really doesn't do justice to this heart warming and unusual tale. This is an Australian co-production with the BBC, so watch out for some familiar faces in atypical roles.

Heart warming

[richleamington · 9/10 · 30 May 2023]

It's a lovely film that's very well written and acted. I'd never heard of it before and randomly picked it from the list on one of my streaming services. Some of the minor characters were sketchy and unbelievable but the main characters, especially the little girl were great. It is a very Australian film in every way, which is also a good thing.

The main theme of the imaginary friends reminded me a little bit, quite randomly, of Craig Gillespie's "Lars and the Real Girl". Unlike that Ryan Gosling flick however this film is much more emotional rather than comedy/emotional. I don't normally cry at films, very, very rarely, but this one got me close.

Gem

[markharnden · 9/10 · 15 March 2023]

Some movies slip through the grinding gears of the industry. If you are lucky, you will stumble across this timeless, near-perfect glimpse of childhood innocence and its power to improve the world of adults.

Against the harsh backdrop of subsistence opal mining in the arid Aussie desert, a life dominated by the dreams of greedy men and their incessant paranoias and rivalries, a little girl nurtures the friendship of two imaginary beings, Pobby and Dingan. When Pobby and Dingan go missing on Boxing Day evening, the whole community is drawn into an imaginative, lilting drama.

How this film didn't win Oscars for it's two childhood stars is a reassuring confirmation that artistic independence and merit still exist, despite the egocentric shenanigans of the star-system and high-end production companies.