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The Price of Milk starts off as a beautiful
(though, granted, somewhat odd) fairy tale...
Once upon a time, a happy
couple named Rob and Lucinda lived together in a dilapidated shack in the middle of the
New Zealand countryside with their one hundred and seventeen dairy cows and their
agoraphobic dog, Nigel, who refused to come out from under his big cardboard box. Rob
(played by Karl Urban, a strange, scruffy mix of Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, and my
friend Mischa) and Lucinda (played by Danielle Cormack) loved to frolic in the meadows
together and wash their dishes while taking a bath in the tub outside their house. In
fact, they were so contented with their life together, that Rob proposed, and Lucinda
happily accepted.
But that’s when things start to get a little
bit...strange.
Lucinda, who’s excited to marry Rob, is also a bit
apprehensive. But, then again, who doesn’t get a case of the jitters before getting
married? So she goes to her best friend to ask for advice. What can she do to keep
their relationship fresh? When her friend suggests that a good fight every once in a
while is just the thing to spice up a relationship, Lucinda starts to stir things up a
bit. She brings Rob a beer—then purposely spills it. She goes swimming in a vat full of
milk, costing them $1,500. And when those things don’t seem to work as well as she had
hoped—and Rob still appears to be more attentive to the cows than he is to her—Lucinda
gives the cows to a strange old woman (and her equally-strange, quilt-stealing nephews)
in exchange for a quilt. Then Rob flips out and goes to live in his friend’s barn, and
Lucinda realizes that she may have gone a bit too far. Instead of causing a little
argument to bring the two of them closer together, her plan backfires and breaks them
apart. So she tries to get the cows back, only to discover that it’ll cost her the thing
that she loves the most.
The Price of Milk is a bizarre and
mystical fairy tale that only gets more bizarre and mystical as the story continues.
What begins as a captivatingly quirky storyline becomes absolutely peculiar and
hard-to-follow by the end. And, like Lucinda’s attempts to improve her relationship with
Rob, it just goes too far. The imagery is beautiful—as is the boldly symphonic
soundtrack—but the story takes one step too many over the line between fun eccentricity
and, well, furrowed brows and migraines.
If you can handle the fact that
you’ll be totally perplexed and somewhat troubled by the last half hour or so of the
movie—or, perhaps, if you’ve already had a few drinks—The Price of Milk is worth
watching. If not, stick with a more comfortably eccentric fairy tale, like The
Princess Bride.
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