Opening ThisWeek
PAll Is Lost
Opens Fri., Oct. 25 at Seven Gables and other theaters. Rated PG-13. 107 minutes.
Do you want Robert Redford to die? The same question can be asked about Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock in this season’s unexpectedly fine trifecta of survival tales, but Redford’s case is special. One of our handsomest, golden-haired movie stars from the ’60s through the ’80s, the actor/director/Sundance Film Festival founder is an improbable 77 years old. To imagine his death is to contemplate the loss of a whole chapter in Hollywood history.
Playing an unnamed solo yachtsman shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean, he’s truly like The Old Man and the Sea—a taciturn, uncomplaining hero in the Hemingway mold. He represents an old-fashioned tradition of self-reliance and competence. Though writer/director J.C. Chandor withholds any personal information about our hero, he has the air of a semi-affluent retired entrepreneur. He wears a turquoise wedding ring and some beaded bracelets that suggest a West Coast liberal (which Redford is); and his 39-foot-sloop, the Virginia Jean, hails out of Portland—but Maine or Oregon we’ll never know. His short voiceover that begins the film—“I’m sorry . . . ”—implies a family, but he hardly mutters a word to himself. He’s living in his head even as the hull cracks open and the elements come raging through.
Chandor’s very accomplished debut, the 2011 Margin Call, addressed the global financial crisis, and All Is Lost is no less linked to world commerce. Our sailor is jarred from a nap by the edge of a floating shipping container full of shoes, somehow lost during its journey from China to the U.S. He wakes into an almost dreamlike scene: No wind, calm sea, and this ridiculous and likely fatal collision between uncaring capitalism and the puny individual. His radio and electronics are flooded, so he calmly and methodically goes about patching his boat while storm clouds gather in the distance. Like Gravity and Captain Phillips, this is fundamentally a process drama: Character is revealed through action, not words. It’s a Shackleton story without the crew to save.
With his weather-lined face and briny thatch of hair, Redford certainly looks the part of an experienced sailor. (You don’t get out to be in the middle of nowhere unless you know what you’re doing.) For non-sailors, there is a lot of line-pulling, fiberglass repair, water-distilling, and sail-trimming; this can be tedious to watch, but the film shows how survival is often a matter of enduring tedium and loneliness. And, as a sailor myself, I must praise Chandor’s relentless realism. The situation keeps getting worse for Redford, as it would, for entirely logical reasons. And against that tide of adversity, he keeps responding logically. (One nice little detail has him shaving before the storm—knowing he won’t get the chance again.) During this eight-day ordeal, it takes 70 wordless minutes to get to Redford’s “Fuuuuuck!” of frustration.
Chandor rarely but effectively pulls his camera up high—or pushes it below in the water, where sharks inevitably gather. Here is a small man adrift, stripped of technology, surviving by his wits. Here, too, is Redford without any Hollywood trappings—no chance to smile or charm. And it’s a great performance, possibly his best, a throwback to the silent movies his parents watched. All Is Lost pushes backward to the primitive: from GPS technology to sextant to drifting raft. It’s a simple story, but so in a way was that of Odysseus: epic, stoic, and specific. Brian Miller
PI Used to Be Darker
Opens Fri., Oct. 25 at Sundance Cinemas. Not rated. 90 minutes.
If the Oscar-winning Once opened the door for such a thing as an indie musical, I Used to Be Darker tiptoes quietly inside the subgenre. And maybe “indie musical” is a misleading description of this admirable film, but it’s better than “critically acclaimed Sundance hit”—although that one’s accurate too. We begin with a teenage girl from Northern Ireland, Taryn (Deragh Campbell), who needs a place to crash after her wild American summer hits a serious snag. She rings up her Aunt Kim (Kim Taylor) in Baltimore, but the timing is bad: Kim is about to leave her husband Bill (Ned Oldham). Their daughter Abby (Hannah Gross), an aspiring actress, is happy to see Taryn but nursing some major resentment against her mother.
Kim’s a singer, still gigging and going on the road; Bill has sacrificed his own musical career because he has to pay the mortgage. A handful of musical numbers emerge from the storyline, which director and co-writer Matthew Porterfield (Putty Hill) treats with the unbroken-take method of shooting. This suggests the characters’ organic need to create art out of unhappiness, to give order to the otherwise clumsy encounters captured here. In the case of a quiet solo guitar number that Bill sings to himself in his lonely basement, the sequence has a surprise finish that is also the only logical conclusion for Bill at that moment. Porterfield’s observations about human behavior are sharp, but he doesn’t underline how sharp. He lets the long-take method define dialogue scenes, too. There’s a painful sequence between Kim and Bill as they sit at a table and work through an entirely recognizable succession of anger, connection, resentment, and more anger—all in three minutes or so. Taylor and Oldham are musicians making their film-acting debuts here, and their plainspoken style with dialogue is as authentic as their way with singing.
Considering all this, it will come as no great shock that I Used to Be Darker is content to leave major plot points unresolved and let music stand in for story beats (as does a Shakespeare recitation, the closest the movie comes to playing a chord too hard). Encountering a song like Taylor’s haunting “American Child,” embedded in the midst of this knotty human mix-up, is resolution enough. Robert Horton
PThe Last Time I Saw Macao
Runs Fri., Oct. 25-Thurs., Oct. 31 at Northwest Film Forum. Not rated. 85 minutes.
The Last Time I Saw Macao serves up a title, plot, and characters that are fragrant with the more exotic strain of film noir. But there will be no Robert Mitchum on hand for this exercise, no trenchcoat in view; and the gunshots that ring out are heard but not seen.
In fact, the plot occurs almost entirely in voiceover. A narrator tells us he has returned after many years to Macao (more commonly spelled Macau), where an old friend named Candy needs his help from threatening underworld figures. The narrator himself might also be in danger. We sometimes hear Candy’s voice in urgent telephone messages, but we don’t see any of the characters. Instead, Portuguese filmmakers Joao Pedro Rodrigues and Joao Rui Guerra da Mata present a series of evocative cityscapes and noirish interiors—we seem to be peering into rooms that the characters have just exited. Which makes sense, because random chance keeps making our narrator miss his assignations with the increasingly desperate Candy.
The only exception to this curious storytelling strategy is the opening sequence, a nightclub song aimed at the camera by the transvestite performer Cindy Scrash (we assume this is Candy). The song is “You Kill Me,” which comes from the 1952 film Macao, a daft Hollywood noir produced by Howard Hughes. That movie will be referenced later, and it’s part of the way Last Time tries to understand its strange, singular location: What is Macao? A movie fantasy, a place to escape? The longtime former Portuguese colony at the edge of China is known as a notorious gambling mecca, but the film implies its madness might stem from its indistinct status as a tiny thumb of existence perched between (at least) two worlds.
If there’s something missing in this place, then it makes perfect sense for a movie to unfold without characters or action present for the camera. But does this get tiresome, even for a movie that comes in under 85 minutes? Amazingly, no: The selection of shots and the visual fascination of Macao keep it compelling. So does the eerie suspicion that—sometime before the movie actually ends—our narrator might have met the fate common to so many film-noir heroes. Robert Horton
Tiger Eyes
Runs Fri., Oct. 25–Thurs., Oct. 31 at Northwest Film Forum. Rated PG-13. 92 minutes.
Published in 1981 and now directed by her son, Lawrence Blume, Judy Blume’s Tiger Eyes is a young-adult novel that puts death and grief squarely at its center. In her many books, so beloved by readers, she’s no less direct about fraught topics—including hormones, heartache, the treachery of friends, and the unreliability of family. Blume herself helped adapt this book to screen (it debuted on video in June), so no one can complain of insufficient fidelity to the source. This both is and isn’t a good thing.
On the plus side, the grieving 17-year-old Davey is played by young actress Willa Holland, who’s got marvelously expressive Audrey Hepburn eyes. She’s plunked down in Albuquerque with her little brother and pill-popping mother (Amy Jo Johnson) after the death of her father in a robbery back in Atlantic City. Davey is friendless in New Mexico and worried that her family will settle there. Forced into the local high school, which clique will she choose? (Not the medievalists! Ewww!) Before she can decide, teenage alcoholic Jane (Elise Eberle) latches onto her. And Davey’s home life is no less problematic, as the family is staying with her overbearing aunt and uncle (Cynthia Stevenson and Forrest Fyre). And more, she’s got to sing at the school talent show and volunteer at the hospital, where she befriends a wise, dying Indian (actor and activist Russell Means) who just happens to be the father of the handsome, soulful Wolf (Tatanka Means, son of Russell), a rock-climbing, Cal Tech–going Native American dreamboat! Who takes her to sacred caves and tribal ceremonies but never pressures her into sex!
OK, a little pruning would’ve helped Tiger Eyes, which also piles on the golden-lit flashbacks to Davey’s old life with her dad. But its melodrama is straightforward and its emotion genuine. Though set in the cell-phone present, the sentiment feels old-fashioned, untainted by snark or sarcasm. Your Facebooking daughters may be well past that point already, so the film’s best audience might be those women who adored the book 30 years ago. Hmm, speaking of Facebook, I wonder what Wolf is doing these days . . . Brian Miller
Zaytoun
Opens Fri., Oct. 25 at Varsity. Not rated. 110 minutes.
As deathbed promises go, this one will be tricky: A Palestinian orphan named Fahed (Abdallah El Akal) must return a spindly olive-tree sapling to his now-Israeli-occupied hometown to honor the wishes of his late parents. But it’s 1982, and the roughly 12-year-old Fahed is currently residing in a refugee camp in Beirut. How this kid will get out of Lebanon and into Israel during a war is not something he’s thought through.
Yet the liberal-minded nature of Zaytoun is such that not only will Fahed find a way, but his passage will also involve Israeli pilot Yoni (Stephen Dorff, late of Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere), who just parachuted into Palestinian hands after bailing out of his damaged plane. If the prospect of these two characters teaming up and hitting the road sounds like a preordained excuse for well-meaning social commentary, well, it is. This is unabashedly the territory of Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones, built on the premise that if warring individuals could only spend time with each other, they might reach some sort of tentative understanding. If such a concept invariably seems simplistic, it nevertheless offers opportunities for drama—especially when the action takes place behind one or the other’s enemy lines.
On the dramatic score, Israeli director Eran Riklis earns a mixed grade. An admirably bold filmmaker, he previously explored issues of occupation and displacement in his acclaimed The Syrian Bride and Lemon Tree. He seemed to go in a more conventional direction with The Human Resources Manager (2010), another road movie, and Zaytoun continues this trend. It’s charming in ways that undercut its setting and purpose, even if a couple of unexpected shootings—one lethal, one not—remind us of the cruelty of this particular war zone. A competent, professionally made movie that falls short is not necessarily a bad thing, but when the political stakes are this high, it feels more troubling when a film settles for half-baked effects. Almost everything about Zaytoun is thoughtful and nice, and that is not enough. Robert Horton
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