What, no superheroes or galactic travels this weekend? It is a breather week at the box office, which means less bombast and more choices. Indies aplenty as well as some think pieces, action films, docs, French films…sometimes it’s good to take a break.
Adrift
Opening with an extended take that efficiently moves us from confusion to desperation, director Baltasar Kormakur sets the gripping stakes of Adrift with scant dialog. His closing is equally effective, showcasing a touching humanity with nuance, and hardly a spoken word.
The journey in between is literally harrowing but cinematically uneven, a sometimes gritty testament to survival that is too often satisfied with the path more traveled.
Adapted from a memoir by Tami Oldham (now Oldham Ashcraft), the film recounts her incredible ordeal surviving over month at sea in the aftermath of 1983’s Hurricane Raymond.
Oldham was traveling the world through odd jobs in exotic locales when she met fiancee Richard Sharp during a stay in Tahiti. Englishman Sharp, an experienced sailor, docked his own vessel and accepted a lucrative offer to sail a friend’s 44-foot yacht back to San Diego.
Shailene Woodley, also earning a producer credit on the film, stars as Ashcraft, instantly establishing an important and authentic chemistry with Sam Clafin as Sharp. The nautical metaphors (with Oldham drifting through life until Sharp becomes her anchor) may be hard to miss, but they go down easy via the talents of the lead actors.
The time alone at sea is layered with flashbacks to how Tami and Richard’s bond was formed, both deepening our connection to them and breaking up the lonely stretches at sea through crowd-pleasing fun and romance.
As the situation grows more desperate, pleasing flirts with pandering, and Kormakur weakens the emotional impact with some unnecessary spoon-feeding.
The film’s tale is truly compelling, and it does deliver satisfying stretches while staying cautious of any narrative risks that might seem disrespectful.
Even at its most dangerous, Adrift feels ironically safe.
Grade: B-
The Rider
The classic western sings a song of bruised manliness. Chasing destiny, sacrificing family and love for a solitary life, building a relationship with land and beast—there may be no cinematic genre more full of romance.
This is the hardscrabble poetry that fills writer/director Chloe Zhao’s latest, The Rider.
Set on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, the film shadows talented rodeo rider and horse trainer Brady (Brady Jandreau), who’s suffered a near-fatal head injury with lingering seizures and must now grapple with his future and his identity.
It’s a classic cowboy tale, really: will he give up cowboying because it will surely kill him, or will he get back up on that horse?
But what Zhao’s film avoids is sentimentality and sheen. With a hyper-realistic style showcasing performances by non-actors who lived a very similar story, she simultaneously celebrates and inverts the romance that traditionally fuels this kind of film.
Images of real poverty butt up against lonesome vistas, a sole horse breaking up the line of the sunset. There’s no glossing over the realities Brady is facing when picking through what kind of future is left for him if he’s not a cowboy. The story is even clearer about what’s ahead of him if he is.
Zhao’s work is unmistakably indie, not a born crowd-pleaser, but beautifully lifelike. She has given new life to a genre, creating a film about the loss of purpose and, in that manly world of the cowboy, masculinity.
Grade: A-
How to Talk to Girls at Parties
Oh, the fish out of water tale. What if X found itself in Y: a mermaid in New York City, an American werewolf in London, an alien in Croyden? What hijinks could arise!
Elle Fanning is that alien, Zan, and Croyden is a suburb of London that was, in 1977, thrashing about to the strains of the burgeoning and decaying punk rock scene.
When Enn (Alex Sharp) and his fanzine-writing mates stumble into an alien house party, believing it to be a punk show after party, Zan abandons the strict duties of her visit to experience life on Earth.
Who better to bring Neil Gaiman’s short story to the big screen than Hedwig himself, John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Shortbus, Rabbit Hole)? Directing, as well as co-writing the adaptation with Philippa Goslett, Mitchell strives to complete Gaiman’s 18 pages with punk attitude, coming of age angst, romance, political asides and style.
He’s only marginally successful on any of those counts.
Fanning captivates, as is her way. All the joy, curiosity and misunderstanding she can muster create a character who becomes far more than simply the first hot girl to pay attention to Enn.
Sharp performs solidly as the wallflower everyman, although that is part of the problem. Scribblings, safety pins and zines aside, Enn is just a middle-of-the-road sweetheart. The film is not about the outsider at all, though it pretends to be.
It pretends a lot of things, sometimes very colorfully and often entertainingly, but without a raucous atonal tune to push it forward and with a fairly lukewarm crisis to overcome, it fails entirely at embodying the punk rock themes it proposes.
Oh my God, this movie is a poseur.
Grade: B-
Let the Sunshine In
Claire Denis + Juliet Binoche = yes, please.
For her latest, Let the Sunshine In, the unerringly insightful French filmmaker takes on middle aged dating, following behind an exasperated Isabelle (Binoche) as she rotates through a series of relationships in Paris.
Isabelle is an artist, though her work—and her 10-year-old daughter, for that matter—are trivialities here. The point is the journey toward that last, real companion for the rest of the journey.
Don’t look for any additional plot here. Denis’s focus, through a circuitous story of relationships crumbling, rekindling and sparking for the first time, simply illuminates the passionate daily trivialities of mid-life dating. She strips away nearly everything besides the ups and downs of Isabelle’s romantic life, sometimes skipping weeks at a time to pinpoint not the relationship itself, but each beginning and end.
Binoche’s generous performance as the self-sabotaging Isabelle embraces the insecurities, optimism and neediness that color the character’s quest. Though never laugh-out-loud funny, the film is a comedy of sorts. There is something absurd about the assault of highs and lows, the desperate lurches toward love and the inevitably disappointing consequences.
And then a big cry and she’s off again.
Though Isabelle is a frustrating, often unlikeable character, the film never judges her. It’s too late to settle, which is a dangerous, selfish, vulnerable decision to make.
Good for her.
Grade: A-
Also opening in Columbus:
Action Point (R)
Always at the Carlyle (PG-13)
Back to Burgundy (NR)
Beast (R)
Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat (NR)
Social Animals (R)
Upgrade (R)
Veere Di Wedding (NR)
Reviews with help from George Wolf.
Read more from Hope at MADDWOLF and listen to her weekly film podcast THE SCREENING ROOM.