Melodrama by the Sea: THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS

Who’s to say what drew writer-director Derek Cianfrance to adapt M.L. Stedman’s novel The Light Between Oceans? But seeing it provides a clue. It’s another of his bifurcated narratives with unsettled loyalties and split focus. Like his Blue Valentine – a scrambled romance told from the time of flirtation and the point of breakup, from the perspective of a man and of a woman – and The Place Beyond the Pines – the story of a criminal that takes a sudden swerve into the story of the cop who shoots him – this new picture has more than one perspective on its narrative. It begins as the story of a World War I vet who takes a job at a lighthouse, enjoying the isolation until he decides to marry a young woman he’s fallen in love with over correspondence. They want to start a family, but find it difficult. Eventually, tragedy strikes, dubious decisions are made, and then they move along like nothing’s wrong. That’s when Cianfrance threads in a third character’s story, a woman profoundly hurt by this couple’s actions, unbeknownst to all involved. As her story crosses theirs, the melodrama is whipped up into a troubling tangle of ethical quandaries.

Handsomely photographed and assembled, this is the sort of glossy, high-toned, languidly serious-minded melodrama that some will feel obliged to give a pass on the grounds of “they don’t make them like this anymore.” (Never mind that “they” and “like this” and “anymore” are nebulous and fallacious terms at best, you get what those folks are saying.) Indeed, this gauzy movie will tickle the pleasure centers of anyone inclined to swoon with so beautifully mounted a production. Thankfully, Oceans is a little better than its mere surface merits, even if it errs on the side of slowly playing out conclusions that are flatter or more predictable than it thinks. Cianfrance has cinematographer Adam Arkapaw (True Detective) make every hour Magic Hour, drenching the frames in beaming sun and winds whipping over the ocean artfully tousling hair and wardrobe. It has all the signifiers of a romance – like a more high-minded Nicholas Sparks movie – with two attractive leads – Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander – falling in love against a gorgeous natural setting. And yet there’s a sneaky sadness that creeps in around the edges, flowering when the consequences of their actions take psychological bloom.

Fassbender plays the leading man as a taciturn, slowly thawing vet wounded deeply by the travails of trench warfare and a nagging, gnawing case of survivor’s guilt. That he falls in love with Vikander’s sweet villager is no surprise. The camera loves her, and she’s at ease in front of it. There’s a tastefully shot honeymoon sequence that lets the camera wander into the lighthouse with her, then takes on Fassbender’s gaze as it slowly creeps around a doorframe to the bedroom in which she stands making smoldering eyes at the camera (which is to say Fassbender and, by proxy, us). Cianfrance gives them the space to sell seduction as a means by which two lonely people marked by the tragedy of their time find comfort together, and with the promise of making a new family out of their love. It’s a cinematic idea that movies might as well have been made for, to watch two people fall in love, and pin their hopes on one another, while the orchestra swells and the camera captures everything in soft montages of pale light-filled images.

But the sadness in their eyes is only dulled for a spell, returning as they discover they can’t conceive. This charged emotion leads to their decision to keep a baby they find floating with a man’s corpse in a rowboat. They tell no one about this event, choosing instead to view this as a gift from God. A haunting moment reveals the lost child. Vikander is sprawled out on the graves of her miscarried pregnancies, her ear to the ground as the sound of a crying infant floats over the howling wind and roaring surf. Later, after Fassbender has been convinced to bury the body and telegraph into town that his wife has given birth, he pries the white cross headstone out of his stillborn child’s grave. One grief’s marker is traded for the emptiness signifying the other. Cianfrance will occasionally underline or overemphasize the emotion of the moment, but in sequences like those there are memorable and lingering effects.

This is powerful material, adding underlying sorrow and suspense to scenes of the baby growing older, amplified when the complicating melodrama really kicks in, revealing the identity of the mother (Rachel Weisz) who assumes her only child has been lost at sea. Flashbacks paint in her backstory with fine economy. Cianfrance plays it straight, allowing us to imbibe the full dramatic ironies of the situation in such a way that refuses easy rooting interest or audience identification. The moral dilemma makes it impossible to have an easy understanding of where the story should go, or even who is in the right as the plotlines inevitably converge, creating only more heartache and confusion the longer it goes. Who deserves happiness? Who deserves forgiveness? The movie is so lush, it’s almost a clash with the harshness in the shocks of its melancholy bouts of understanding and even, improbably, mercy. Great actors do their best to make slightly plausible plot turns into something approaching humanity, while the filmmaking around them contains them in a cinematic tradition of beautiful suffering and picturesque romantic tragedy.

Passed Down: THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES

If you go to see The Place Beyond the Pines, you’ll pay to see one movie and get two more at no extra charge. That’s not because the film’s overstuffed, but because of the film’s structure. It’s built out of three stories that are separate and yet flow into each other, not so much evolving as filling up with evocative resonances and echoes. Writer-director Derek Cianfrance must like this sort of thing. His last film, the great, harrowing relationship drama Blue Valentine, cut back and forth, balancing the beginning and end of a relationship, tentative young romance smashing inevitably into aged tensions. With his new film, Cianfrance has created something of an intimate epic. Running nearly two-and-a-half hours, it feels long, spanning two generations, confidently shifting the protagonist not once, not twice, but three times, leaving the structure feeling like three short stories placed back to back.

As the film starts, we’re introduced to a drifter, a handsome stunt motorcyclist played by Ryan Gosling. He travels with a carnival, breaking hearts and making a little bit of money in each town. That routine changes when an old flame (Eva Mendes) introduces him to his son. Now desperate to be a part of his child’s life, he attempts to settle down and soon resorts to making money in a less-than-legal way. That’s how we meet an ambitious young cop who becomes the film’s new focus. He’s played by Bradley Cooper as a proud, privileged man desperate to make something out of his life. He’s a man whose rich father (Harris Yulin) and worried wife (Rose Byrne) can barely understand why he’s chosen such a risky profession. I’ll save the film’s last story unspoiled except to say that it riffs on the choices these two men make and the impact they have on the next generation.

Cianfrance briskly establishes vivid detail out of casually precise production design and meticulous performances. A fairly early scene of adrenaline, suspense and daredevilry ends with Gosling vomiting on the rough wood floor in the back of an empty cube truck. I could almost feel the sweat, sawdust and stink in my nostrils. When the cut away from this scene starts up a Springsteen song on the soundtrack, it was only underlining what, by that point, was more than clear. We’re seeing a blue-collar story song of a film, a meandering tribute to the working class. Gosling and Cooper are playing characters who use what they do to define who they are and their attempts to either live up to and break away from those definitions lead them down different, yet in many ways similarly perilous, roads.

It’s thematically overreaching and narratively overdetermined and inefficient, but there’s an absorbing pleasure to the way the film plays out. It doesn’t come together as smoothly or completely as its structure suggests, but there are nonetheless satisfying echoes across three discreet plot arcs, like when an early long shot of Gosling riding a motorcycle down a wooded two-lane road is mirrored in a late long shot of a teenager riding a bike down the very same road. It’s effective. Cianfrance (with co-writers Ben Coccio and Darius Marder) has made a film of immersive plotting with the harder-than-it-looks pleasure of narrative curiosity. I cared as I wondered what would happen next for the characters and was eager for the unfolding events to tell me more. There’s a confidence to the film’s ambition and indulgence that I was willing to accept. The destination may be slightly less than the journey promises, but the sheer narrative pleasure kept me more than enough engaged.

Love Story: BLUE VALENTINE

Blue Valentine tells a story that could be told easily, simplistically. After all, how many couples have the same story in its broad outlines? A man and a woman meet. They fall in love. They get married. Time passes. They grow apart. A relationship that starts with playful sparks ends with burns. What elevates this film is its unflinching specificity, its searing emotional intensity, and its marvelous performances. It’s all in the telling. This is a story of love, but it’s not exactly a love story.

When we first meet Dean and Cindy, they’re married with a small daughter and a missing dog. They converse and through their seemingly routine morning conversation it is clear that their relationship is falling apart. Their words crackle and bite at the edges of polite behavior. Tension hangs in the air between every space and silence of the dialogue. Every word spoken feels like a careful yet hasty step into a field of landmines. They agree to a romantic weekend. He books a hotel in a themed hotel with a suite poignantly called “Future Room.” It’s unclear whether or not their marriage has one.

It wasn’t always this way. We see them years earlier. They’re younger, fresher, smoother, two young people maneuvering around each other in the first, gentle steps towards romance. He comes on strong. She resists. They talk. Each word seems to slip carefully, inexorably towards comfortability. He serenades her. She does an awkward little dance. They grow closer. They feel safe together, as if all of their problems will disappear just because they love each other enough to make it work. They’re falling for each other.

Writer-director Derek Cianfrance (with his co-writers Cami Delavigne and Joey Curtis) takes the beginning and the end of this relationship and weaves them together creating interesting resonances and comparisons but serving, most of all, to add layers of tension to an already wrenching portrayal. The film’s structure makes the romance bittersweet and the break-up all the more painful. In the “Future Room” Dean puts in a CD and plays a song – “You and Me” by Penny & the Quarters – in a late attempt to reopen the romance. Later, we’ll hear the same song again. Dean plays it for Cindy early in their relationship, introducing it as “their song.” Indeed it will always be their song, but, as we see all too clearly, the meaning is all too fluid.

We’re a step ahead of the couple when they’re starting out, prematurely pessimistic as they see nothing (or almost nothing) but potential. Then, we’re right with the two of them as their relationship breaks apart. Their past weighs heavily on the current tensions. The break-up is for the best; it has to be. We have plenty of evidence to think that their marriage is untenable, dangerous even. But the dissolution doesn’t feel easy.

The film is so beautifully done, exquisitely haunting, emotionally exposed and harrowing. Like two perfect short stories dancing together, one all beginning, the other all painful end, the film moves between its separate yet intertwined plots with an intuitive, expressive ease. The couple is played by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in performances of such emotional openness and raw conflict and romance that it doesn’t seem like mere acting. No, this is instead a duet between two performers fully inhabiting their characters at two separate moments in their lives. The way they navigate their characters’ internal feelings towards one another and externalize this in painfully raw intimacy is some of the finest screen acting in recent memory.

Watching Blue Valentine doesn’t feel so much like a typical story of a relationship as told in the movies. I felt like I was eavesdropping, looking in on a slow-motion wreck of a relationship while knowing far too much about its beginnings to remain impartial. It feels, at times, queasily personal. This is a film with characters that keep no secrets from us. It’s unflinchingly honest and emotionally draining. When the credits rolled I had to sit in my seat while my heartbeat could normalize and my hands could stop shaking. This is not just an excellently structured drama with amazing performances, though it is. This is a full emotional experience.