Derek Cianfrance (2016)
The Place Beyond the Pines, Derek Cianfrance’s previous film, had (unconvincing) pretensions to being a modern Greek tragedy. There are lofty touches in Cianfrance’s latest too, which is set in Australia, mostly in the 1920s. The melancholy, withdrawn Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender), recently returned from action in the Great War, takes a job as a lighthouse-keeper at Janus Rock, named for its dual aspect between the Pacific and Indian Oceans. (Janus Island is a real place off the coast of Western Australia although it didn’t in fact get its name until 1955.) The pivotal event in The Light Between Oceans occurs when a rowing boat, containing a dead man and a live baby girl, washes up near the lighthouse. It seems highly unlikely the baby would have made it through this ocean voyage when the adult male didn’t: the only alternative to dismissing her survival as ridiculous is to accept it as a mysterious fact and the baby Anadyomene as kin to survivors in Shakespeare’s late plays.
Tom Sherbourne weds Isabel Graysmark (Alicia Vikander) in 1921. She suffers two miscarriages in the first years of their marriage. Fearing she’ll never be able to have a child of her own, Isabel pleads with her husband to let her keep the baby the sea has brought them. Tom refuses at first – he knows it’s his duty to report full details of the discovery to the authorities – but he capitulates to Isabel. He buries the man’s body and the couple raise the child, whom they name Lucy, as their own. Shortly before Lucy’s christening on the mainland, Tom sees a woman in the churchyard. She is kneeling by a gravestone, which bears the names of a man and a baby lost at sea on the very day that the boat washed up at Janus Rock. The baby’s original name was Grace. Tom keeps his discovery a secret from Isabel but, three years later, the Sherbournes meet Hannah Roennfeldt (Rachel Weisz) and her sister Gwen (Emily Barclay) at a ceremony commemorating an anniversary of the lighthouse. They get into conversation with Gwen, who explains Hannah’s tragedy. The truth becomes clear to the distraught Isabel.
By this point, only the most optimistic viewers will still be entertaining hopes of substantial connection with classical mythology or Shakespeare: it’s become clear that the unconvincing storyline is not a means of exploring rich and strange themes but merely a matter of narrative convenience. We learn, in verbal explanations supported by visual-aid flashbacks, that Hannah’s husband Frank (Leon Ford) was subject to anti-German prejudice in the aftermath to World War I; after an argument with Hannah, he jumped into a boat and went to sea with the newborn baby. As you do. It’s hard to believe in the first place that the professionally conscientious Tom would give in to Isabel about burying the corpse and keeping Lucy – that he doesn’t suggest to his wife that they can try again for children. (There’s no hint they ever do try.) It’s harder still to accept that a man with Tom’s capacity for keeping his own counsel would, after seeing the gravestone inscription, risk intensifying Hannah’s distress by sending her an anonymous letter, which tells her that her husband’s dead but her baby’s alive and well cared for. In view of Tom’s line of work, the fact that Hannah’s wealthy father (Bryan Brown) is some kind of sponsor of the lighthouse and their regular contact with Isabel’s parents on the mainland, it’s surprising the Roennfeldts’ sad story hasn’t come to the Sherbournes’ attention sooner.
Unlike Derek Cianfrance’s three previous dramatic features, this new one is based not on an original screenplay which he wrote or co-wrote but on a different author’s work. The Light Between Oceans was the best-selling debut novel of M L Stedman and published in Australia in 2012. This may be unfair to Stedman but there’s a rising sense of mismatch between the daft plot and the seriousness with which Cianfrance treats it. Anthony Lane in the New Yorker describes the film as ‘oddly old-fashioned’. It certainly needs to be more thoroughly old-fashioned: a Hollywood treatment of this kind of melodrama a few decades back would have gone with the grain of the source material, instead of straining fruitlessly for emotional depth. There are awesome seascapes, photographed by Adam Arkapaw, and an Alexandre Desplat score that suggests surging passions but Cianfrance cleaves continually to creating a human tale that’s smaller and tougher, and at odds with these other elements. The depth of characterisation of two of the three main actors serves to expose rather than conceal the story’s improbabilities and evasions.
Rachel Weisz is particularly strong but the reality she gives to Hannah’s grief makes it a worse omission that she’s denied the opportunity to rail at the Sherbournes for what they’ve done to her life – especially since Lucy-Grace (Florence Clery), when she’s returned to Hannah, understandably wants Isabel back. Tom feels guilty at having survived the war when so many others didn’t and that he is bound to pay for the added good fortune of loving and living with Isabel. Michael Fassbender is almost too convincing as a man who expects the worst to happen; at least this ensures that we share Tom’s experience of rare moments of pleasure or high spirits as an unexpected gift – when Isabel first brings him out of his shell as they sit and talk, or when Tom plays games with Lucy. The film ends with an unexpected reunion between the late-middle-aged Tom and the adult Lucy-Grace (Caren Pistorius, confirming the good impression she made in Slow West), who now has a child of her own. The widowed Tom, though no longer a lighthouse-keeper, still lives in complete seclusion: Fassbender, with the help of some fine aging make-up, is especially convincing in this epilogue. As in The Danish Girl, Alicia Vikander switches quite abruptly from initial girlish charm to all-out suffering. The former is nicely done but Vikander doesn’t create much connection between the two versions of Isabel. When she pleads with Tom that they keep the baby, it would be good to be reminded that this is the same girl who, earlier in the story, urged Tom – with the same surprising and wholehearted impulsiveness – to marry her. There’s no such reminder: Alicia Vikander has by now changed tack to tragic mode. She’s an unexpectedly good runner, however – she proves it in a couple of sprints from the lighthouse to the seashore.
Each of the three big European actors deploys an Australian accent that might kindly be described as restrained. The real thing is supplied by a supporting cast whose naturalistic playing is often impressive. Jane Menelaus and Garry McDonald, as Isabel’s parents, are excellent: the dynamics of the dinner-table conversation at the Graysmarks’ home, when Tom visits for the first time, are beautifully achieved by Derek Cianfrance. Even the actors playing law officers and others who bring Tom Sherbourne to ‘justice’ are less crudely vengeful than you’d expect. There are plenty of talented people involved in this movie but their taste and discretion are ill-suited to the task in hand. Asked how she can find it in her heart to forgive the Sherbournes, Hannah recalls her late husband’s reply, when she asked him how he could forgive the locals for their racist abuse: you need forgive only once; you have to remind yourself to resent every day. This appealing idea is so patently untrue that even Frank Roennfeldt forgets about it when he makes the fateful decision to row out to sea. We seem meant to accept it, nevertheless, as the uplifting moral of the story of The Light Between Oceans. This might have been a more successful film if more of those involved in making it had been infected by the hokey shamelessness that shaped Frank’s motto.
3 November 2016
