Lantana is an engrossing study of several middle-aged married couples and how their lives intersect before during and after a missing person mystery occurs. The mystery is clearly secondary to the wonderfully developed character studies that are the true focus of the film. This is probably the best work Anthony LaPaglia has done (that I've seen), and all the other actors seem similarly inspired. The "unknown" Australian actors hold their own with the ones you know: LaPaglia, Hershey, and Rush. I don't want to give any of the plot away, but LaPaglia plays a guilty cop who is trying to justify his own extramarital activities while seeking to understand his wife's restlessness. The script considers all the characters' feelings of guilt, betrayal, boredom, anger, grief, and regret. And the characters, a la Magnolia or Pulp Fiction, keep bumping up against each other in one way or another. And these are ordinary folks! Middle-class mores and middle-aged angst over marriage, money, and sex are also woven into the mix. This is simply a marvelous and very adult drama that will bear multiple viewings and is worth owning or renting.

Summary by Face51 from FL from www.netflix.com

This is an interesting film about the nature of marriage. It's about the way marriages tend to get into routines and lose their passion, and about how infidelity breaks the trust bond. Despite its optimistic ending, it doesn't seem to like marriage very much. There are five marriages involved in the multiple stories, and four of them are unhappy. I think the movie is pretty honest and unflinching in its assessment, but I think it's a little harsh. Marriage is a partnership, and it's not possible for most couples to maintain the passion they felt in the beginning of their relationships. I think that's natural for most people. Here we're given one couple (a Latino couple, no less) that has maintained their passion despite their brood of small children and grueling double shifts to afford them. Three of the others, however, are frosty WASPs who have felt barriers arise for one reason or another. Mostly due to broken trust, which it shows is very difficult to repair. Once a spouse cheats, it takes a long time for the other spouse to believe he or she is going to actually "be working late." All time spent alone is suspect and raises old fears and hurt. This film should get a lot of credit for examining the nature of middle-aged marriages, and I wish we could get more on this topic. I think it loses some of its courage at the end with the optimistic musical montage that shows the marriages repaired or strengthened, but at least it had the courage to tackle this topic.

As far as the mystery goes, the movie does a good job of laying things out in a predictable manner but following through unexpectedly. At one point in the second half I became bored, because the film's somber tone had started to wear on me. I also thought I had guessed all of the secrets, but then I realized all of the suggestions that had been planted were to mislead us. That may make it sound like it's a gimmicky mystery with a bunch of red herrings, but it doesn't feel gimmicky. I think the reason is because the story doesn't revolve around the mystery. That's just the thread that ties all of these people together, but it's not really that important to the story. It's important to John (Geoffrey Rush), of course, but the story is really about broken trust and marital unhappiness. At the end I felt bad for John, who had lost his daughter earlier and now lost his wife, because the film seemed to lose interest in his character at the point he was the most devastated. He had erected walls around himself to deal with the grief of losing his daughter, and now he had to live with the grief and guilt for losing his wife. After surviving one loss like that in my life, I don't think I could handle two. --Bill Alward, June 21, 2002