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| The old man (Redford) and the sea in All Is Lost. |
««« All Is Lost. Written and directed by J.C. Chandor. At select theaters.
When it comes to dire
adversity, there are two kinds of people in the world: people who scream fuck! right away, and people who do it
later—or maybe never. In J.C. Chandor's chamber work All Is Lost, Robert Redford plays a nameless man on a solo voyage
across the Indian Ocean. He's not only all alone on his little yacht, he's the
only human being in the film. There's barely any dialog (or even monolog). When
his boat is crippled in a collision with a stray shipping container, does he ever
get around to uttering that choice four-letter word? Since that's one of the
pleasures of this strange little film, I won't spoil it here.
At a
time when less is not more at the
movies, Lost is a refreshing return
to minimalism. Mostly, the "action" is comprised of Redford peering
ruefully at his damaged vessel, breaking out various tools, and laboriously
making repairs. But Nature—which one supposes qualifies as the only other
character here—undoes his patient efforts every time, until this resourceful
man is stripped of all his comforts, his tools, and his hope.
The
advertising for the film shrieks about "pulse-pounding suspense", but
don't believe it. The suspense in All Is
Lost isn't the "pulse-pounding" kind. Instead, it's of a more
cerebral variety—the kind where there's an unexpected noise, and Redford (and
we) are left to ponder what else has gone wrong. The
lack of dialog will inspire some—alas, wrongly—to call Lost a silent film. On the contrary, Chandor depends heavily on
sound effects—the wind, the patter of raindrops, the tell-tale rip of a sail
off-screen—to tell his story. There have been few films in recent memory that
have depended on sound so completely. (So much the worse for most of us, then,
that we'll see All Is Lost in a
multiplex, with the bass-lines from Thor
and The Hunger Games pounding through
the walls.)
If
rebirth through adversity is more or less unavoidable in this life, then the
real theme of this film is solitude. Here,
even more so than in Alfonso
Cuarón's Gravity, the filmmaker prefers to pare
down his story to essentials—and what he regards as "essential" is
the lone individual. There's no cutting away to the
wife/husband/kids/mission-control, sweating out the ordeal from long distance,
as we'd see in more conventional thrillers.
On the
surface, the convention seems reasonable, to see individuals as significant
only in relation to other people. As Chandor and Cuarón suggest, though, framing the struggle that way shifts
the emphasis from another, equally-important connection: how the individual sees
him- or herself. As the planet becomes more noisy and crowded, with friends and
relatives never more than a status update away, that internal report may be the
most endangered relationship of all.
©
2013 Nicholas Nicastro
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