[yasr_overall_rating]
Based on the true story of survival, a young couple’s chance encounter leads them first to love, and then on the adventure of a lifetime as they face one of the most catastrophic hurricanes in recorded history.
Based on a true story, a young couple sailing from Tahiti to San Diego gets caught in Hurricane Raymond and faces the worst tropical storm of the 1983 Pacific hurricane season. Tami (Shailene Woodley) is 24 years old and filled to the brim with fearlessness and wanderlust. Her childhood was haphazard at best, with a teen mother, a sporadic father, and raised by her grandparents. When she finally reached her high school graduation, she hit the road, traveling anywhere but home for the next 5 years.
Her wanderings eventually bring her to Tahiti where she finds a job at one of the marine docks and meets Richard (Sam Claflin), nearly 10 years older than her, but dashing and charming and every bit the sailor she dreams of becoming. The scenes move quickly, depicting the budding romance between these two carefree and happy vagabonds. Dinners on his boat that he built himself, a new dress for Tami, swimming in the ocean, sailing excursions together. Richard also knows a childhood of heartache and loss; they bond quickly through their love for sailing, but also their need for a place to call home in each other. He tells Tami he’s sailed half the world looking for her.
As the film tells it, Richard and Tami bump into an older couple at the market one day. They are friends of Richard’s and they want to hire him to sail their 44-ft yacht to San Diego for them. This is the trip that will take them into their greatest struggle and loss and fight of their very young lives as they encounter Hurricane Raymond.
The beginning is a little overly sweet and sappy, but with only 120 minutes, the story needs you to fall in love with Tami and Richard as quickly and as deeply as they did with each other. In spite of some of the Hollywood silliness to the romance, Woodley and Claflin make a great combination, with quality acting and natural chemistry together.
The time sequence of the storytelling is by far the best decision for this film’s success, in my opinion. Going into the movie, you will already know that the story centers on a catastrophic event in nature. With this in mind, I appreciated that there was no big drama in building up to the actual event. Instead, the film literally opens into the aftermath of the nightmare, mixing the intrigue of what happened with the imperative of their greater dilemma: survival. In this way, the hurricane functions more as a catalyst and less as a climax of the story. Overall, this is a fantastic movie, not because of its cinematic brilliance, but because of its normalcy and how easily you will be sucked into the humanity of shock and fear and grief…and the will to live.
As with many movies based on a true story, there is a book that came first. Books by nature are usually better at capturing more dialogue and emotional detail than a movie can reliably recreate. However, this may be one film where I would make a strong case that the movie is quite possibly better than the book, mostly because of the storytelling strategy that allowed the director to create the illusion of a plot twist. If you’ve read the book or you googled ahead of time about the veracity of the film, you’ll already know. But I feel certain that if you will allow yourself to first experience this story through the creativity of director Baltasar Kormákur, you will be wowed and devastated all at once. Then, after the film, read the book or google about Hurricane Raymond and the story of this brave beautiful couple. This is not your typical summer film of love basking in mango kisses and hair tussled with salty sea spray. There is that, but only as a bittersweet memory in a phenomenal story of 41 days adrift in an ocean of aloneness. “Adrift” is not an action adventure meant to keep you riveted in suspense. It’s the slow agony of a stretched out grief, the wandering of a soul cut to the core with the dead weight of love and loss.
In theaters Friday, June 1st
