Denis Villeneuve (2016)
Twelve extra-terrestrial spacecraft land on Earth, each in a different part of the world. One of the craft arrives in Montana: the US army calls in academic linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) to try to interpret the aliens’ language and so infer the purpose of their visit. The extraterrestrials in Arrival – large, tentacular cephalopods – communicate using a system of sinuous circular symbols, which Louise and Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), the theoretical physicist with whom she sets to work, begin to decipher. When Louise asks what the aliens want, she gets the answer ‘offer weapon’, as do her international counterparts. This leads to nervous defensive action in some of the countries concerned; they shut down communications or scramble their military forces in response to the apparently threatening message. Once her grasp of the aliens’ language improves, Louise has second thoughts: she believes that ‘tool’, rather than ‘weapon’, may be the mot juste, and she’s right. The aliens are motivated not by aggressive hostility but by enlightened self-interest. It transpires that they know they’ll need humanity’s help in three thousand years’ time and are therefore getting their good turn in first. Their gift to us is their language. Once you master it, you also experience time as the aliens do, in a non-linear way: you see the future. This explains the film’s opening and several subsequent sequences, which feature Louise and her daughter Hannah, who appears at different stages of her childhood. Louise, as she becomes fluent in ET-ese, is able to preview her child’s life and, before Hannah has reached her teens, her very premature death.
The revelation that the visitors to Earth are not looking for trouble – in spite of a characteristically human suspicion of the contrary – isn’t new (viz Close Encounters of the Third Kind). The extra-terrestrials are puzzled that our planet has no unified leadership or language. Louise doesn’t tell them about the Tower of Babel or that Esperanto was tried and failed. (The history of Esperanto was, incidentally, the subject of an interesting piece by Joan Acocella in the New Yorker of 31 October[1].) The spectacle of global superpowers keeping a nervous eye on what each other are up to, instead of joining forces for the good of all humankind, makes a political point that’s unsurprising. Even so, Arrival is welcome evidence of intelligent life in the sci-fi cinema universe. Eric Heisserer’s screenplay is adapted from a 1998 short story by Ted Chiang called Story of Your Life. The linguistic theme is unusual and its visualisation adds to the distinctiveness. The spacecraft – big, grey, streamlined egg shapes in a real landscape (Montreal pretending to be Montana) – are arrestingly believable. The aliens’ shapes and their stop-go, loping movement are oddly beautiful. The ill-fated Hannah, with her combination of fragility and ethereality, is a real star child. (She’s incarnated successively by Carmela Nossa Guizzo, Jadyn Malone, Abigail Pniowksy and Julia Scarlett Dan.) Ryan Gilbey, in a small minority of critics who’ve given the film a negative review, complains in the New Statesman that, ‘Where Close Encounters of the Third Kind gazed outward in awe at the universe, Arrival asks only how its mysteries might provide succour and illumination for us’. I prefer this kind of human introversion to the starry-eyed approach.
The idiosyncratic imagery and the heroine’s loss of a young daughter both bring to mind Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, another recent, highly-regarded sci-fi movie, but the prevailing tone is very different here. All three of the Denis Villeneuve films I’ve seen – Prisoners, Sicario and now Arrival – are set in a spiritually dark place and this is reflected in their visual scheme. Villeneuve’s gifted cinematographers (Roger Deakins on the two earlier films, Bradford Young on this new one) bring light to the darkness but don’t do much to modify Villeneuve’s rather deadly solemnity. The melancholy strings music that Jóhann Jóhannsson has written for Arrival lays on the glum atmosphere all the more thickly. Villeneuve seems to have an insatiable appetite for misery. The welcome news that the aliens mean no harm, Louise’s successful efforts to get China to call off an attack on the spacecraft and the visitors’ return home, mission accomplished – these things might suggest a happy ending yet they’re emotionally overshadowed by Louise’s personal bereavement and eventual solitude. Ian becomes her partner and Hannah’s father but they separate somewhere in the future. Louise’s personal sadness overshadows too the movie’s philosophical posers: if you could see your whole life laid out in front of you, would you change things; if you knew your unborn child would live only a few years, would you let her come into existence?
Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker, as a senior army officer, both underplay impressively. As an antsy, unpleasant intelligence agent, Michael Stuhlbarg fulfils a standard function in this kind of drama – repeatedly disagreeing with, and getting bested by, the protagonist. For an academic adviser to the US military, Louise Banks acquires a surprising degree of authority and independence: Amy Adams plays her with such assurance and conviction that you almost suspend disbelief. It’s difficult to fault Adams’s performance yet at the end I felt sorry that, in the last ten days, I’d spent nearly four hours watching this versatile actress looking almost continuously unhappy (in Nocturnal Animals before Arrival). Adams may have come a long way since her Junebug and Enchanted days but I’m not sure it’s the right way. Her desire to test herself as an actress is admirable but she shouldn’t assume that characters who chronically carry the weight of the world on their shoulders are proofs of dramatic range and depth.
14 November 2016
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/a-language-to-unite-humankind
