Review: The Waiting City

The Waiting City
Dir. Claire McCarthy
Year: 2010
Aus Rating: M
Running Time: 100mins

An affluent white couple arrives in slum-ridden India and within hours the airline has lost the wife’s luggage and the husband has gotten sick from drinking the water. These may be scenarios you would find in a light-hearted fish out of water comedy (it’s half the plot of Sex and the City 2, actually), but in this case they are the starting points to Claire McCarthy’s mature and poignant tale of lives affected by adoption in The Waiting City. McCarthy had previously worked as a volunteer in Calcutta and has used this life-changing experience as the basis for this her second feature film. Starring Radha Mitchell and Joel Edgerton, both of whom returned from successful American careers to make this small, some might say “intimate”, exploration of a failing relationship teetering on the brink of collapse.

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The Waiting City is beautiful and poetic and I don't mind admitting a shed a couple of tears. However, on a far more crass note - has Joel Edgerton ever been more, ahem, doable? I think not. He just gets better with age, doesn't he? I'm so glad Americans, along with the rest of the world, will soon be getting a whole lot more of him from Animal Kingdom, The Thing remake and Warrior.