Three stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and brief sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.2.16
Embracing an overblown melodrama
requires an act of faith on the viewer’s part: a willingness to sympathize with
the protagonists — to understand and accept their behavior as reasonable — even
if (when) they yield to ill-advised impulses.
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| After several failed attempts to start a family, Tom (Michael Fassbender) and Isabel (Alicia Vikander) finally are rewarded with a child of their own ... but in a rather unexpected manner, and one that will have tragic consequences. |
But if they cross the threshold
of acceptable conduct — if they betray our trust with an act too bewildering, or heinous — then the
film’s hold on us is broken. The spell under which we’ve allowed ourselves to
be placed, shatters like a broken mirror.
Such is the case with scripter/director
Derek Cianfrance’s adaptation of Australian author M.L. Stedman’s 2012 novel, The Light Between Oceans. Because,
despite the best efforts of its two talented stars, there comes a moment beyond
which we cannot maintain sangfroid: a plot hiccup that is, indeed,
unforgiveable. Compassion, and the patience to put up with anything that
follows, are lost forever.
Mind you, the film’s contrived
plot and execution require considerable endurance to begin with. Cianfrance’s lackadaisical
approach is old-style Hollywood, by way of Thomas Hardy or the Bronte sisters. He
and cinematographer Adam Arkapaw favor extremely
tight close-ups, and while Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander respond to
that challenge, with nuanced expressions, the technique grows tiresome.
So does Alexandre Desplat’s
melancholy orchestral score. Mind you, I’ve been an avid fan of Desplat’s work
ever since 2003’s Girl with a Pearl
Earring, but his despondent themes here hammer the melodrama; the despair
is relentless. And with Cianfrance subjecting us to 132 minutes of this morose
character study, it’s just too much.
No doubt everything worked in
Stedman’s novel; this sort of saga was born for the literary form. But as a
film, with a self-indulgent director who prefers long-suffering gazes to
expository dialogue, one can’t help feeling that he’s piling on the schmaltz
and noble sacrifice with a shovel.
The setting is the remote edge of
Western Australia, immediately following World War I. Tom Sherbourne
(Fassbender), a shell-shocked veteran, has come to the tiny community of
Partaguese in order to accept a posting as keeper of the crucial lighthouse, on
the isolated and otherwise uninhabited Janus Rock. The island is miles from
land, approachable only by boat, although the light keeper’s house has running
water and all essential amenities (handy, that).
Tom is quiet, withdrawn and
stoic: unable to understand why he was spared, when so many of his comrades
perished on the battlefield. The experience has left him uncomfortable in the
company of other people; his seclusion on Janus Rock isn’t merely by way of
comfort, but to some degree — in his mind — some sort of necessary,
self-imposed punishment, for having survived.
