[yasr_overall_rating]
A lighthouse keeper and his wife living off the coast of Western Australia raise a baby they rescue from an adrift rowboat.
Writer/director Derek Cianfrance made his presence known with the impressive feature length debut “Blue Valentine” – an erotic, challenging and desolate cinematic haiku, which featured one of Michelle Williams’s best performances. High on the accolades and attention the film received, Cianfrance went on to make the rambling-but-ambitious “The Place Beyond the Pines.” The film had its intense and graceful moments, suggesting (or rather leading one to hope) that this was a misstep, rather than an unraveling of a once-promising artist. Unfortunately, the latter proved to be the case. Little did I expect the dreck that is “The Light Between Oceans” to be the follow-up “Pines” foreshadowed.
Let’s start with the trailer, which not only rightfully suggests a perhaps teeny-bit-more-polished Nicholas Sparks adaptation, but also reveals the entire plot of the film in less than two minutes. So why sit through over two hours of it, you ask? Aside from a few redeeming factors on which I will elaborate below, having patiently endured the ordeal, the answer eludes me, as does the answer to another, equally imposing inquiry: what the hell was the director thinking? What made him pick M.L. Steersman’s debut historical novel, a well-written but somewhat predictable and half-baked tale that seared its wings by soaring to unreachable heights? Apart from the whole affair clearly being Oscar bait, with its swooping score and camerawork, at what point did Cianfrance decide that this material would correspond perfectly with his anything-but-sappy sensibility? He wrote the damn thing too – either the paycheck was impressive enough to set aside artistic integrity, or Cianfrance has officially morphed into just another Nick Cassavetes.
1918, December. A traumatized Australian WWI soldier Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) returns home from France after four years of witnessing unimaginable terrors (luckily, the actor does a persuasive job insinuating what those might have been). He agrees to look after a lighthouse on a remote and desolate island, taking over from another keeper, who committed suicide after sending signals to his dead wife and getting “cabin fever.” Sounds like the beginning of a horror film – and one could make a case that “The Light Between Oceans” is just that, based on the number of miscarriages, stormy nights and tears featured in the narrative. Only it would make for the most boring horror film ever, its most frightening aspect being the director’s indulgence in Hollywood staples.
I digress. Totally enamored by this handsome, broken man, young Isabel (Alicia Vikander) soon finds herself marrying and moving in with Tom, a ray of bright light in his otherwise-dim existence (yes, there are a lot of those subtle metaphors scattered through each freakin’ frame of the film). Darkness does eventually seep back into the light: during a brutally stormy night, Isabel has a miscarriage, the lighthouse proving to be futile when it comes to guiding her to safety. After a second miscarriage (Cianfrance should’ve gone three for three; it’s like we’re watching “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”), poor Isabel is on the verge of a breakdown… when, by some celestial miracle, Tom spots a boat out in the ocean, with a baby girl and a dead man inside. How convenient!
“Can we leave her awhile?” Isabel asks, eyes glazed over with motherly love. “Give her time to catch her breath?” His face all, “I see where this is going”, Tom reluctantly agrees. Next thing they know, many months pass by. Just as Tom reads to his child, “there came a sudden cry out of the darkness,” he spots Hannah (Rachel Weisz), kneeling and weeping by a tombstone, with a plaque that says something in the vein of “Father and Child, Lost at Sea.” Tom puts two and two together, and then, well, I won’t spoil it for those who, after reading all this, still want to watch “The Light Between Oceans.” I will say that a baby monkey rattle is crucial to the plot, that Tom ends up in jail, and (okay, SPOILER ALERT) there’s an extended, gag-inducing prologue featuring a daughter visiting her surrogate father.
Aside from the hard-to-buy premise of the plot, there are the constant run-ins between Tom and Hannah at just the right time. Everything in the film seems to unravel like a your average fruit: in the beginning you hope for a maracuya but nope, all you get is a basic orange. The “cabin fever” that the initial keeper of the lighthouse experienced (may his soul rest in peace) is never touched upon – the couple seems perfectly happy, frolicking away from humanity with nothing but each other and the wind to keep them company. The film doesn’t tighten its scope, or framing, or pace as it progresses, which would potentially make it more of a claustrophobic experience.
And dammit, the tears. Every main character in the film cries in at least 18 scenes. I don’t remember the last time I saw that many close-ups of watery eyes and snotty upper lips. And wouldn’t YOU cry, if you had such dialogue to enunciate? “You’re still a mother and a father, even when you no longer have a child,” Isabel shares wisely, as the two of them sit on a cliff-side, gazing over an endless ocean. “There’s a light inside of you,” Tom writes, “and it shines as bright as the light in the skies.” “You…” she stammers. “You make me feel like… peace.” “When it comes to the ocean, anything’s possible,” Tom observes. My favorite exchange happens early on in the film: “We can’t talk about the future, only what we imagine we wish for,” Tom says elusively. “So what do you wish for?” Isabel wonders, moving in closer to him. “Life”,” he says. The film is generally very wet: aside from the tears, there’s all the rain, ocean, mist and sap that drags you down, making it the definition of a slog to sit through.
And dammit, the metaphors. The film starts with a sunrise and ends with a sunset. Numbed by death, Tom runs away from the darkness of war; “Out here,” he says, “I am only responsible for the light.” The film’s soundtrack is overbearing to the max; in fact, I blame Alexandre Desplat’s score for the film’s triteness as much as I blame the director. “The Light Between Oceans”’ best moments are the quiet ones, where only the whistling of the wind and the rustling of the grass can be heard. The same exact film without thunderous music guiding you through its emotion terrain would have arguably made for a much less manipulative and more contemplative experience (key word being “arguably”). Curiously, for a film filled with so much tears and drama, I never felt anything but aggravation and the excruciating passing of time.
Michael Fassbender, one of our great actors, is reduced to a caricature of a man scarred by war. He does what he can with his expressive eyes, but his performance is one-note, revealing little dimension beyond “seeking solace.” Alicia Vikander is effective in a couple of scenes but again, her character isn’t fleshed out enough, given enough backstory or motivation for us to truly care about Isabel. Weisz casts the most memorable impression in an all-too-brief role as Hannah, but yet again, she did much more with way less in “The Lobster.” Cinematographer Adam Arkapaw, who shot last year’s “Macbeth” – a much better film starring Fassbender – saves the film from being utterly worthless with his breathtaking scenic shots, evoking painters of that period like Gerhard Bakenhaus and Granville Redmond.
While “Blue Valentine” was succinct, raw and subtle, “The Light Between Oceans” is bloated, glossy and obvious. Whatever noble intent it may have had to hark back to the glory days of filmmaking are overshadowed by its dullness and predictability. The actors and production values barely save it from hitting rock bottom, but this is just as shameless as your run-of-the-mill Sparks adaptation, only with the pretense of being a major award contender, as if Cianfrance watched “Kramer vs. Kramer” and decided to fuse it with “Atonement.” In one word: ugh.
In theaters September 2nd
