Reception
The film won the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm, shared with Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine) and a Best Performance Prize for Holly Hunter at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival. In 1994, the film won Academy Awards for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Holly Hunter), as well as Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Anna Paquin) and Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. Anna Paquin was the second youngest person after Tatum O'Neal to win an Academy Award. Holly Hunter is notable for being one of three actresses — along with Marlee Matlin (for her American sign language performance in Children of a Lesser God) and Jane Wyman (for her deaf-mute role in Johnny Belinda) − to receive an Academy Award for Best Actress in the post-silent era for a non-speaking role (her voice is only heard off-screen in a few scenes). The film made its US premier at the Hawaii International Film Festival.
Critical reaction was overwhelmingly supportive. Roger Ebert wrote: "The Piano is as peculiar and haunting as any film I've seen" and "It is one of those rare movies that is not just about a story, or some characters, but about a whole universe of feeling." Hal Hinson of The Washington Post called it " evocative, powerful, extraordinarily beautiful film." On the film site Rotten Tomatoes, The Piano scored 90 out of 100 percent; in a sample of top critics, it scored 100 percent.
Read more about this topic: The Piano
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
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