Schepisi doesn’t seem eager to let her go.

But Elizabeth remains a force and, like Lear, she’s not going quickly or quietly. Mother or “Mummy,” as Dorothy calls her - using a humorous pronunciation that invokes the image of Boris Karloff staggering about in ragged bandages - may be fading. His Lear, however, has been trounced by the critics, as his mother slyly remarks soon after he first visits her. He died in 1990.) Shakespeare’s “old and foolish” king is initially invoked in connection with Basil, an actor who has made his name abroad. (The book was first published in 1973, the year White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The theme of “filial ingratitude,” to borrow a phrase from “King Lear,” looms in Fred Schepisi’s dramatically unsteady, blustery if likable film, which was adapted by Judy Morris from the Patrick White novel. During their visit Elizabeth fades in and out, by turns raging and murmuring as she fights the world, her seemingly ungrateful children and maybe herself. Much as she has in the past, Elizabeth Hunter (Charlotte Rampling), an Australian matriarch, lords over all, including her servants and two children, Basil (Geoffrey Rush) and Dorothy (Judy Davis), who have returned to her, reluctantly, skittishly, to secure their inheritance. The curtain rises in “The Eye of the Storm” with the old lady in bed, angrily grasping at the covers and a life that she refuses to relinquish.

Eye of the storm story