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Review

A beautiful young Australian woman (Winslet), while vacationing in India, falls hard for a religious cult leader. Her family coerces her back home, and to spend time with a macho deprogrammer. Wildly uneven, Holy Smoke! boasts terrific, brave performances by Winslet and Keitel (two actors never shy to reveal all, both physically and emotionally) and some stylish direction, but also succumbs to cartoonish stereotyping (especially Winslet's family). The film begins and ends badly, but many of the scenes between the two leads -- set in a hut in the middle of the empty, sprawling Australian Outback -- are compelling, even though they never rise to the enticing war-of-wills/battle-of-the-sexes free-for-all promised early on. Worth seeing for the leads and for its successful moments, but Holy Smoke! is a missed opportunity: what was presumably intended as a loosely structured character piece comes across instead as a jumble of interesting (and middling) ideas that never come into focus.