Yes, we fell hard for M.L.Stedman's 2012 novel, a brutally heartbreaking romance set somewhere off the western Australian coast, right after World War I. The operatic plot, which sounded like it came from a soap opera writer running a high fever, leveled a universe of woe upon the novel's star-crossed, storm-tossed couple......Tom Sherbourne, a stoic emotionally scarred war veteran and his adored bride Isabel. When Isabel joins her husband in his isolated life as a lighthouse keeper on rocky, remote island, multiple tragedies afflict them, followed by an amazing Godsend. Or so Isabel believes. Still mourning the deaths of their two unborn children from miscarriages, the couple rescues an infant girl from a washed ashore rowboat whose only other occupant is a dead young man. Reluctantly, Tom gives in to Isabel's imploring that they keep the child and raise it as their own.
This....as they say in stories like the one we just described.....does not bode well.
Stedman's novel completely sucked us into this melodramatic stew and despite our best efforts to remain aloof and dismissive......damn, if we weren't aching and sniffling along with the characters. The baby girl, as you might have already figured out, belongs to a heartbroken widow from the town on the mainland......the stiff in the rowboat was her husband, the baby's father, a German harassed by the townsfolk for his country of origin.
The 2016 film adaptation arrived staffed with top-of-the-line talent....with Tom and Isabel played by Michael Fassbinder and Alicia Vikander, two actors who excel at conveying internalized torment. And,let's be honest here, they also make one pair of good lookin' movie stars, , which doesn't hurt if you're filming a weeper that requires a box of tissues next to the butter popcorn. The film's screenwriter-director Derek Cianfrance certainly knew how to push emotional buttons....ask anyone who sat through "Blue Valentine", his corrosive examination of a crumbling marriage with Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams. Want more prestige? How about Rachel Weisz as the grief-stricken real mother of the castaway baby......award nominations seemed guaranteed.
The book, despite its reputation as an overblown potboiler, became a steady best seller, engaging and gripping its readers. The movie, gorgeously photographed and acted with expected brilliance from its sterling cast, sank faster than a two ton anchor hitting sea bottom. As far as awards season went.....the movie never happened. So what did happen?
Here's the BQ autopsy......director Cianfrance caught a bad case of 'scenery-itus', which for a movie director, is worse than the Shingles or an STD. This malady usually hits directors in the autumn of their careers (prime example, David Lean's "Ryan's Daughter").......storytelling takes a backseat to pretty pictures, the running time gets padded out with endless sunsets, high tides,forbidding mountains, windblown trees....yada yada yada. And liberally drenched, like chocolate sauce on a Sundae, with a film composer's lush, insistent score. (Alexandre Desplat does the honors here.)
This story begs to yank tears, but Cianrfrance stages his actors' numerous suffering in the same brooding, moody low gear as his travelogue camera work. While we felt deeply for the book's characters, we could only casually observe their cinema versions. The movie should have been unafraid to grab us by the throat slap us around a little, shake us up. Instead, it settles for sitting around like an over-sized coffee table book of scenic full color National Geographic photographs.....waiting to be admired. By the time Cianfrance reaches the story's resolutions, he's wasted so much time pointing at rocks and surf, the wrap up feels hasty......especially in his rendering of the book's final, affecting epilogue.
The BQ will unashamedly burst out in 4 full tears for M.L.Stedman's novel (****) but we can barely squeeze out 2 of them (**) for the movie. Stick with the book.
No comments:
Post a Comment