Light of My Life
Casey Affleck (2019)
Directed, written by and starring Casey Affleck, Light of My Life begins with a bedtime story, told by a father (Affleck) to his daughter, Rag (Anna Pniowsky). It’s a variation on the Genesis account of Noah’s Ark; both the man and the conveyance feature in the father’s making-it-up-as-he-goes-along narrative. Its moral seems to be that Noah’s salvific reputation is exaggerated. His Ark is far from waterproof – a resourceful fox called Art saves the day. (Affleck isn’t an actor you think of as putting on voices other than his own. It’s an amusing surprise that Dad gives the biblical patriarch an Australian accent that nods to the casting of the title role in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.) Rag, who’s a critical but thoroughly absorbed audience, looks to be about ten. That might seem old for a bedtime story but it’s soon clear that her and her father’s circumstances are extraordinary. Camped out in the British Columbia wilderness, they have only one other for company every day of their lives.
The diluvial tale is apt because Dad and Rag (we learn that her birth name is Ann, her nickname from Raggedy Ann) are trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Seven or eight years ago, a deadly virus wiped out half the global population. During the opening story sequence (which runs more than ten minutes and is thoroughly engaging), you’re struck by Rag’s boyishly short hair. It transpires that the virus victims were exclusively women, including Rag’s mother (Elisabeth Moss), seen in flashbacks through her husband’s memory[1]. Rag, an infant when the plague struck, is one of the few females still alive on Earth and an invaluable commodity as a potential means of regeneration. In order not to lose her, Rag’s father has decided they must live in hiding. Rag is always disguised as a boy for the rare occasions when they encounter other people.
They move from place to place, making occasional trips to populated areas to buy provisions. The morning after the bedtime story, a man approaches their tent, talks with Dad, compliments him on having such a ‘comely boy’. The remark is enough to alarm Dad into moving on. When they find a deserted house, Rags pleads with her father to let them stay there a while. He agrees, though he’s furious when she finds and puts on girls’ clothes that, to Rag’s delight, fit her. Dad also makes careful arrangements to enable a quick getaway when it’s needed. That turns out to be soon. One of their shopping outings raises suspicions about Rag’s gender that bring a posse of armed men to the house.
I guess it’s understandable that Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), which majors on diligent scientific effort to subdue a lethal international virus, has enjoyed a new lease of commercial life in recent months (though watching Soderbergh’s dull movie during lockdown strikes me as doubly masochistic). This isn’t going to happen with Light of My Life, with its ravaged, post-pandemic setting and almost exclusive focus on a single personal relationship, however representative that relationship may be meant to be. Affleck’s film is reminiscent, rather, of John Hillcoat’s The Road (2009), which featured a father-son duo on the move in a (more mysteriously) devastated world but the exchanges between Dad and Rag, often quietly humorous, are much more emotionally varied than their equivalent in The Road. Light of My Life also calls to mind Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace (2018), even though the father-daughter’s nomadic, in-the-wilds existence in that case was dictated less by force of circumstance than by the man’s singular mentality (shaped as that was by his dissatisfaction with normal life).
Light of My Life presents an idealised, even sentimentalised, view of women. (Once you’ve watched it, you realise this is signalled in the less than brilliant title, which turns out to describe Dad’s view of Rag and of his late wife, rather than how the child sees her father or the wife her husband.) Telling Rag the world won’t get back into balance until there are sufficient women in it, Dad laments the tendency of men to get angry, lonely and sad. In the flashbacks to his wife’s last days, he tearfully tells her he’ll never cope without her; she, dying, selflessly assures him that he will. In the closing scene, he weeps again; he holds on to his daughter, as he held on to his wife, for comfort. When Dad talks to Rag about her mother, he recalls how she relished whatever they did together as ‘a love adventure’. In the film’s final line, Rag offers consolation by telling him, ‘It’s a love adventure, Dad’. Women, though rendered nearly extinct as a species, can cope with life and death in ways that men can’t.
Affleck’s script nuances this simplism through Rag’s more astringent reactions. For a start, Dad introduces the female fox Goldy as the main character in the opening bedtime story but, as Rag observes once it’s through, her male partner Art turns out to have the starring role. (Later on, Rag adjusts the story to give Goldy the prominence she deserves.) When Dad does what he sees as his duty by giving his daughter a sex education talk, Rag starts off suppressing impatience that he’s telling her things she already knows (though, from the look on her face when he tries to describe it, menstruation isn’t one of them). By the time he’s done with reassuring her that what she’ll experience is nothing to worry about, Rag’s mood has changed. She remains silent but now seems both shocked and resentful. Her father has been stressing the natural condition of being female. Their life together depends on his not allowing her to be.
We never know Dad’s name, which makes sense. It makes emotional sense too that his and Rag’s last (though again short-lived) refuge was once the home of Dad’s grandparents, a place that holds happy childhood memories for him. Light of My Life works best as a semi-allegorical drama of the impossibility, or at least ephemerality, of a parent’s guaranteeing protection of their child. Concealing Rag’s gender resonates with the idea of trying to prolong her childhood (and Dad’s repeated use of the word ‘safe’, to describe pubertal changes among other things, is significant). Here too, Affleck illustrates the child’s sharp awareness as well as the father’s anguished struggle. When Rag raises the idea of Dad’s being taken from her, by separation or by death, he insists he’ll ‘always be with you’, come what may. Rag is often ready to argue when they disagree but here she keeps her feelings to herself. We read them, though: she knows that if Dad dies he won’t really be with her; she also knows he needs to make-believe otherwise.
Dad, from an early stage, is given to flights of emotionally extravagant fancy. ‘Do you know how much I love you?’ he asks. ‘To the sun and back’, she replies, having heard it before. ‘To the sun and back thirty thousand times’, he insists, before asking how much Rag loves him. She is more measured: ‘To the top of a tree’. When he’s humorously, but nonetheless really, disappointed, she adds ‘and back down again’. In the film’s climax, as they try to escape through an upstairs window of his grandparents’ house, Dad hangs on to Rag, telling her it’s too far a drop. ‘Dad, let me go’, she keeps insisting. When he eventually obeys, she does more than survive the fall.
The occupants of this house are three men, who read the Bible together but have guns on the premises, to protect their animals and ‘keep the wolves away’. The eldest and friendliest of the trio, Tom (Tom Bower), shows Rag how to use a gun. Firearms don’t help Tom, who is killed when another three men invade the house in pursuit of the guests there. Dad, a determined pacifist, changes his ways to subdue two of these assailants but is about to succumb to the third when Rag arrives on the scene and shoots the man dead, accidentally wounding her father in the process. She capably dresses his wound before finally cradling him in her arms. The child is mother to the man.
The sustained drama of the central relationship comes at the expense of detail about the post-apocalyptic world of the story. The film is strong on stark, ominous mood, thanks to Adam Arkapaw’s cinematography and music by Daniel Hart (who has scored the films of David Lowery, Affleck’s regular collaborator). Arkapaw drains exteriors and interiors of colour (not so difficult outdoors: the landscape is under snow much of the time) to bleakly beautiful effect. Hart’s music, which is used judiciously, combines gravitas and tenderness. The screenplay is good on the main pair’s gruelling routines: whenever they move to a new location, Dad identifies a hiding place within it and a means of escape from it, and ensures that Rag commits these to memory. The script also gives an idea of the informal education she’s getting from her father, as when he explains, in answer to her question, the difference between morals and ethics. We never get much idea, though, of life outside the principals’ experience, of how society is trying to rebuild itself, or of quite how extraordinary Rag is. There’s a brief reference to laboratory production of female babies in California but hardly anything more. It’s almost as if, because Rag is uniquely precious to Dad, she literally is the only girl in the world.
Casey Affleck justifies his self-casting, banishing doubts as to the wisdom of a still inexperienced director working on both sides of the camera. Not for the first time, he portrays, distinctively and persuasively, a man both loving and needy. I don’t know if Affleck really is DIY-inclined but he certainly seems it on screen: he’s as convincing here as he was in Manchester by the Sea as a capable handyman. You wouldn’t put it past him building an ark himself. The bedtime story and birds-and-bees scenes are complementary in various ways, not least in Affleck’s handling of what are essentially two lengthy monologues, punctuated with short interjections from Rag. It’s vexing to see him described, as he sometimes is, as a hyper-naturalistic mumbler: he speaks with exceptional emotional precision. In the opening sequence, his voice is quietly animated and his inflections varied. In the sex education scene, nearly every sentence ends on the same rising inflection, expressing Dad’s tense determination to get through saying his piece.
Soon after arriving at his grandparents’ old house, Dad is questioned by Tom, who asks not whether but why Rags is a girl disguised as a boy. Dad denies this at first but, realising that Tom knows, eventually admits to it. When he says ‘my daughter’, Affleck conveys how amazing it is to Dad that he’s finally uttering these words to another human being. Anna Pniowsky, aged ten when the film was made, is a fine partner for him, and Affleck gets an extraordinary performance from her. She’s a remarkable camera subject, with a touch of the young Mia Wasikowska and, through her boyish appearance, a touch of Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows. Pniowsky’s Rag is touchingly vulnerable yet old beyond her years. You might think the presence of Elisabeth Moss in a screen work with solemn gender themes and a dystopic setting would be confusing in light of The Handmaid’s Tale. In the event, Moss is an appealing, unusually warm presence in her small, key role.
This is the first feature that Affleck has directed since the mockumentary I’m Still Here (2010). Without having seen the latter, I’d guess the attention it attracted was eventually excessive – by virtue of the allegations around what went on during production. Light of My Life, in contrast, looks set to stay under the radar. Shot in early 2017, it didn’t appear until nearly two years later, at the Berlin Film Festival. Although it was released internationally during 2019, I missed the film when it came out in the UK so it must have been a pretty limited release. (I caught up with it on Amazon Prime Video.) This lack of profile isn’t a surprise – the piece is stubbornly anti-commercial – but it’s a pity. Casey Affleck may well now regret making I’m Still Here. There’s a great deal he can be proud of in Light of My Life.
10 July 2020
[1] I’m not sure if it’s made clear that they were married but I’m calling them wife and husband for convenience.