Sink, Sank, Sunk: ALL IS LOST

Halfway through All is Lost, I felt seasick. I remained queasy into the end credits and felt myself wobbling on the way out of the theater, like I was adjusting to walking on land again. In the film, the camera bobs as the weight of the boat, the film’s only set, slowly rocks while the sound of sloshing waves is omnipresent. The film is a convincing and spare look at a man lost at sea, his sailboat taking on water as he drifts through the Indian Ocean. Who is he? Why is he here? What has he to lose, beyond his life? Writer-director J.C. Chandor doesn't say. We don't even learn the man's name. He’s listed in the credits as Our Man. But because Robert Redford plays Our Man, wise wrinkles crinkling with the concern painting his 77-year-old face, he's someone who carries with him a sense of history nonetheless. We care about him instantly, because we carry with us a collective cinematic memory of him. He’s been acting on screen for 54 years. All he needs to do is stand in the frame and we’d feel we know him, even if we learn nothing more about him.

We find Our Man waking below deck to the sound of water sloshing up against his bed. The following scenes show a man of great resourcefulness doing everything right, setting about repairing the boat methodically and thoroughly while drifting at sea. We learn about him through action, the screenplay an example of all show, no tell. The only words we hear are his muttered curses. Presented in careful detail, it has an air of authenticity about it, like a worst-case-scenario handbook come to life. Call it Introduction to Crisis Boat Repair. He patches the hole, dries his stuff, and attempts to fix his soaked radio. If I were in his position, I would be panicking. In his supreme competence, he does far more than I would've thought to do, but then again I wouldn't think to go sailing alone in the Indian Ocean, either. I mean, I got seasick just watching this movie.

Chandor crafts a story of faux-Hemingway sparseness and blunt import. Redford's visage is what we watch, straining for clues. Who knows that he is out here? Who will miss him when he’s gone? Our Man is lost, weather a constant antagonist, working to undo the progress he’s making. Baking sun, wild waves, and downpours of rain make for relentless enemies. In the dubious tradition of characters named for easy surface access to the themes of their story, he’s clearly a signifier of masculinity and maleness, ruggedly moving forward in the face of impossible odds. He’s adrift in this world, battered by commercial impulses of our globalized economy (it’s a stray shipping container full of sneakers that punctures the side of his boat), and left with all lost. Hope rises and falls like the waves and weather that cause hope to dwindle with every passing hour. Still he tries to find new ways to scrape by.

That’s all well and good, but Chandor’s film is one that cut me loose pretty quickly, frustrating me with the obviousness of its symbolism and its stinginess with character. It’s Redford’s performance that holds it together, in conjunction with the impeccable sound design that swirls around him. What feels so bracing at first – a quiet walkthrough step by step as new obstacles are confronted with the ever-resourceful skills of Our Man – grows grating and repetitive. We get a glimpse of his wrecked boat in the opening shot before flashing backwards a specific period of days. The rest of the film is spent slowly getting to and then past the spot where we came in. After a while, I found myself counting sunrises and sunsets, sinking into my chair as I realized just how far we had to go.

There’s just too little for me to hold onto. If you find the anonymous man’s plight engaging, I can only say I wish I had seen the movie the way you do. From where I sat, Alex Ebert’s nice score grows maddening. Blurry artful shots from underwater, complete with CGI schools of sea creatures wiggling past, feel like nothing more than treading water, a wasted attempt to add visual interest to a film otherwise so visually dull that I was yearning for any personality behind the camera. It’s unfair to compare All is Lost to Life of Pi, since it’s not attempting the same transcendence and abstraction of that man-lost-at-sea picture. But it would’ve been nice to have a little visual interest beyond professional shininess, caught somewhere between heightened Hollywood jolts and slow cinema contemplation. Chandor’s film is as spare and functional as Our Man, highly capable, but still sinking fast.

A Company on the Verge of a Breakdown: MARGIN CALL

The entirety of J.C. Chandor’s debut feature Margin Call plays like the first act of a disaster movie, the moments when the experts slowly become aware that things are about to go very wrong, that the world of the film is about to explode. In this case, the disaster is all too real, has already occurred, and we’re still living in its aftermath. Set in the fall of 2008, the film takes place over 24 hours in a big financial firm as one analyst figures out just how bad things are going to get. The shocking truth he discovers is that risky bets on mortgage-backed securities and the like are about to come up for big losses. The company is over leveraged. The decisions that are made this night will mean the difference between the life and death of the company, of its workers’ and their families’ finances, and probably for the entire American economy, if not the world’s. Sound familiar?

The film starts with a fired risk analyst (Stanley Tucci) giving a flash drive to one of his youngish employees (Zachary Quinto). It contains the formulas that predict impending devastation, the keys to understanding the suddenly very real possibility of complete and total financial ruin for the firm. He passes this information along to his boss (Paul Bettany), who passes it along to his boss (Kevin Spacey), who gives it to analysts (Demi Moore and Aasif Mandvi), who give it to their boss (Simon Baker), who calls in the CEO (Jeremy Irons). It’s an all-star cast (or a close-enough approximation of all-star) ready and waiting for the disaster to strike, repetitively going over their options and weighing consequences. They can see it coming, they can try and slow its approach, but this thing is going to hit and hit hard.

Chandor fills the film with tense boardroom scenes and jargon-filled power plays, along with brief moments that play almost like asides, sketching themes too concretely. At one point, during a rooftop smoke break, one suit actually peers over the edge and says, “It’s a long way down.” What this screenplay could have used was characters who were more than just symbols and with more bluntly clever macho Mametian rat race rat-a-tat in their dialogue. (Paddy Chayefsky and Aaron Sorkin are further good examples of the kind of character-driven satirical spark technical talk can sometimes have). The actors – most of them pretty great – are ready to sink their teeth into meatier roles than are provided.

This is a film that tries to create characters that are understandable, relatable even, in a film that looks to find empathy but not excuses. It gets there, but it’s all so heavy handed. I believed these actors were the kinds of serious suits who would soberly and gravely use bursts of business speak to tersely and tensely discuss risky financial deals. What I didn’t believe were the moments like the ones when Bettany gives a remorseless little monologue about how people say they want a fair world but “nobody actually wants that,” when Tucci trots out a wistful bridge-building anecdote to make the point that Wall Street produces nothing of tangible value, or when Spacey reveals he has a symbolically significant dying dog at home. The small details of the film are so convincing – the jargon, the drab gray production design, and the simple modern costumes – but the words spoken are so often flat that, try as I might, I simply couldn’t believe the big picture.