J C Chandor (2013)

All Is Lost is all about Robert Redford.  It has to be:  the film has a cast of one and Redford’s character has neither name nor biographical context.  He’s a yachtsman, sailing his craft, the ‘Virginia Jean’, alone in the Indian Ocean.  The writer-director J C Chandor begins his second feature (the first was Margin Call (2011)) with a voiceover, spoken by Redford, which supplies little information beyond the fact that there are people – presumably the sailor’s family – to whom he wants to send a valedictory message.  (When you first see the man, you notice he wears a strikingly large ring, with a big blue stone at its centre, on his wedding finger.)  Approaching what he thinks is the end of his life, he expresses in this message regret for what he’s failed to do.  After this ‘all is lost’ (the man’s own words) prologue, a legend on the screen reads ‘Eight days earlier’.  The man wakes one morning to find the ‘Virginia Jean’ holed below the water line, following a collision with an errant shipping container.  In spite of swift, resourceful efforts to repair the damage, he’s soon in perilous difficulty as he tries to keep the boat afloat and himself alive.  You naturally want him to succeed in doing so – because he’s a human being/Robert Redford up against it rather than because he’s an individual you’ve decided is worth rooting for.  The sailor might be a serial killer or a Tea Party member; you’ve no idea why he’s on his own in the Sumatran Straits.  The gravity of that opening voiceover immediately suggests that All Is Lost means to be a very serious movie.  The implication that the man won’t outlive it, that an extended flashback will describe eventually unavailing attempts to survive, warns you not to watch those attempts in the way that you watched Tom Hanks marooned on his desert island in Cast Away.

A central theme of Chandor’s movie is impending death – the character’s situation and Robert Redford’s advancing years naturally call to mind the lines in The Dry Salvages:

‘There is the final addition, the failing
Pride or resentment at failing powers,
The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,
In a drifting boat with a slow leakage …’

It’s only when the action moves beyond the point at which his farewell message-in-a-jamjar has been dispatched that you get a sliver of hope that Redford may survive.  (In one of the most expressive moments in the whole film, he makes to throw the jar as far as possible but then drops it limply into the waters.)  Even in the closing stages, Chandor shows Redford, after he’s set his inflatable life raft on fire to try and attract the attention of a distantly passing craft, floating down and away underwater, as if to death.  Finally, he comes to and realises the other vessel is miraculously close.   He rises to the surface; you see a hand reach out and he grasps it before the screen goes dark and the closing credits come up.

Redford is being praised for the performance of his life and this role is certainly a career-defining one – in the sense that it’s a statement of his fundamental qualities as a movie actor.  He has always seemed happy in his own company on screen, letting the camera get closer to him than any fellow actor but still not too close.  The last moments of All Is Lost are ambiguous – perhaps the man is losing consciousness and merely imagining salvation – but they provide an entirely happy ending for Redford:  taking the life-saving hand is as near as he gets to interacting with another human being.   Redford has had some famous screen partnerships – with Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were, Dustin Hoffman in All the President’s Men, Meryl Streep in Out of Africa.  Redford doesn’t really connect with any of these co-stars; since the relationships with Newman and Hoffman are absolutely straight and the films in question depend on a combination of star quality and an engaging plot rather than character, this lack of connection doesn’t much matter.  The movies with Streisand and Streep are, I think, more memorable because Redford is just the right actor to play men who are fascinating but infuriatingly inaccessible to the women who love them – and because the actresses, trying to spark Redford as an actor, share something of the plight of the characters they’re playing.  (Redford’s mysterious reserve also holds your interest in The Great Gatsby although you don’t believe in his passion for Mia Farrow’s Daisy.)

In All Is Lost, there are several reasons for wanting Redford to beat the odds.  He’s always been interesting to watch and you’re grateful to him for that; you also admire what he must have put himself through physically to make this movie.  He reads the opening words very well – his voice supplying what is, for Redford, a surprising depth of feeling and tension.  After this, what he says consists of:  a brief, abortive attempt to communicate an SOS message over the boat’s wireless; a moment of anguished frustration when he yells ‘Fuck!’ (the film’s certificate warns of ‘a single use of strong language’ and it feels like the single such use in Redford’s long career:  it’s an unusual pleasure even to hear him shout); unheard cries of ‘Help!’ in the direction of a Maersk vessel.  (This sequence was briefly disorienting as it was a Maersk ship Tom Hanks was in charge of in Captain Phillips a few screen weeks ago – and I’d watched Cast Away in preparation for seeing All Is Lost.)   There’s no further dialogue.

Is the rest of what Redford does great acting?   No: much of the movie is virtually documentary description of how the sailor tries to survive – any halfway decent actor could do this.  David Edelstein, in lauding the performance, is right that Redford can convince you in a way few other actors can that he’s thinking – although it seems to me that he brings a magnetic quality to looking intelligent rather than tells you specifically what is going on in a character’s mind.  Edelstein is right too that when the sailor in All Is Lost is running out of options and thought appears to give way to emotion the impact is strong but I think this is simply because the dominance of emotion is so unusual to see in Redford – not because he’s overwhelmingly expressive.  What is remarkable is that Redford is both old to be playing the role at all and in amazing physical shape for a man of his age.  His good looks have survived without any evidence of cosmetic aids and he looks much younger than his seventy-seven years.  He gives J C Chandor – and the audience – the best of both worlds, a combination of everyman vulnerability and movie star immortality.  There’s some very beautiful submarine photography by Peter Zuccarini, especially configurations of fish and the climactic image of the ring of fire that was once the life raft.  Up above the water, Frank G DeMarco captures some equally wondrous cloud formations and sunsets, especially one that, through a slow fade, suggests the ending not just of a day but of a life.

30 December 2013