Cloudstreet is a complex tale to tell, and like my review, the mini-series from Showtime Australia just isn’t large enough to fully encompass the story. It is by all means a visually stunning work of art that is wrapped in metaphor and, on a more simplistic scale, tells a story about Faith and perseverance in the lives of two working class families who have survived even the most tragic of events in their long history together and apart. Still, there is just no way to fully grasp the story, even in the full 365 minutes of film.

The series takes place from 1943 to 1963 and features two families, the Pickles Family and the Lamb Family. They are the Yin and Yang to one another. The Pickles, a faithless family whose shifty shadow of luck and or fate guides them aimlessly through the dark. The Lamb’s are a family of Faith, their God a beacon in the turmoil of even the most rot circumstances. In the midst of family tragedies the two unlikely neighbors come together under the roof of an inherited home on Cloud Street. The Lambs, prospering in the warmth of their family togetherness and the Pickles falling apart as they become more and more distant, always relying on the tides to turn in a game of chance they will never win.

What makes this series so hard to grasp is that there is so much information that just isn’t represented that would make all of the difference in the world. For starters the world of Cloudstreet is one in which a small amount of magic exists. The home in which the two families reside is haunted, as seen by Fish Lamb, a boy who drowned and was brought back, only to have given him strange insight and bizarre supernatural powers. Mr. Pickles one day comes across a bird that has the ability to drop coins from its body (I’ll let you guess what part). This is just the tip of the iceberg in regards to how much magic exists in the world of Cloudstreet, magic that seems to be presented as an everyday occurrence but which holds no real bearing. It reminded me of LOST, how there seemed to be so much unexplained stuff going on, most of it never answered.

There seems to also be no redeeming qualities to almost all of the characters in the series. If you find yourself hating a character your more then likely going to continue to do so long after the series has ended. I didn’t feel as if they properly fleshed the characters out. Their unlikable here, hopeless, but more importantly just a day to day representation that never grows. I have to feel as if I am connecting with characters in at least some small way. I simply could not connect with any of them and wondered about more then half of them who exist in the series but who seem nameless and without purpose. It simply made me think that the series would have been a bit better had it been expanded to more then just six episodes or been given an extension on each episodes run time. Less then an hour for five episodes did not do the story justice (the final episode runs one hour and twenty one minutes).

In the end I absolutely loved the visuals in the series, the representation of days fleeting as the camera catches the change in the skies in fast forward, the dream sequences or not dream sequences, that seem to be left for you to decide, and of course the house itself, alive and awake in its own way. It is a beautiful looking show, but its story suffers tremendously.

Bonus features includes Behind The Scenes features including Adapting an Australian Classic, Creating the world of Cloudstreet, From novel to script to screen, Casting the magic, creating the music, and more Adapting The Australian Classic seems to be the way to go as far as supplemental material is concerned. It runs a whopping 41 minutes sheds a little light on what might be missing as far as translation and cultural losses between its native Australian audience and its audience here in America.