David Denby

The taut young Australian actress Judy Davis has the most arresting face in movies today. In Gillian Armstrong's High Tide, she is very pale, with scarlet, amost purple lips and high cheekbones, and at times she emits the Medusa-like malevolence of Bette Davis at her most fierce. The movie is only so-so, but Davis gives her fullest performance yet. She plays a woman whose husband has died, causing her to abandon a baby daughter in grief and muck up her life. Years later, she runs into the girl, now a teenager. Davis's character is self-hating but proud, intelligent but willfully idsorganized, capable of great tenderness and also great cruelty. The movie is about her attempts to pull herself together and assume responsibility for the girl. Davis makes every facet of this woman's consciousness dramatic. We can see her nerves shrieking in pain and, now and then, in pleasure.

David Denby
New York, March 7, 1988