ALL IS LOST: A Silent Monologue

In which a seventy-seven year old actor loses 60% of the hearing in his left ear because he decides to do his own stunts.

Director: J. C. Chandor

Writer: J. C. Chandor

Cast: Robert Redford

Runtime: 106 mins.

2013

All Is Lost asks the question: Why would anybody go on a boat?

The movie begins with a brief Hemingwayesque voiceover in which Robert Redford's character shares a few sparse sentiments. "I tried to be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't." We don't know who he's speaking to--us? God? a loved one?--but he goes on to say that all is lost now, and that he is sorry.

This is the only significant dialogue in the entire movie, and it is dispensed with in the first thirty seconds. It's not specific, and the words aren't especially beautiful in and of themselves. But the essentialist quality of these phrases hangs over the essential action that is to follow, such that it gains much meaning and nuance and significance as we witness the eight days leading up to these words. There are many trials in this movie--the protagonist wakes to find his boat skewered by a shipping container filled with tiny sneakers, and he patches the ship up just in time to encounter a series of massive storms brewing on the horizon--but the focus is always on the man at the center of it all. Or maybe the trials are the man. And the man is the movie. It's hard to separate them.

The actor behind the man is Robert Redford, and this makes it awfully hard to separate the actor from the character, too. You could imagine any number of aging Hollywood figures in this role; one critic even suggests that Chandor uses Redford more like a meat puppet than a performer, and there is some validity to that. But despite the absurdly functional and reactive role this movie forces the actor to play, it's hard to think of a more perfect choice than Redford. He is known in Hollywood for being a loner, uncomfortable with celebrity, comfortable with solitude, humble, passionate, determined, self-contained. He doesn't watch his own movies. In his late seventies, he even insisted on doing his own waterlogged stunts throughout this movie's shoot. It becomes even harder to separate actor from character when you hear Redford say that the script was so pared down and open that he immediately knew he would be playing himself in a terrible situation rather than a character (he even wears his own rings). Then there's J. C. Chandor's admission that the final concept of the movie crystallized at a film festival where Redford's microphone was malfunctioning--thus the idea of a voiceless Redford. Add all this together and you have a performance that feels more real and grounded than any other I have encountered in recent memory.

I'm a sucker for aging Hollywood actors, especially in action roles, and Our Man (as he is designated in the script and credits) is candy to my ears. Music to my eyes. Whatever. Redford never fails to hold our attention despite seldom uttering a word, which puts All Is Lost in stark contrast to 2013's other survivalist epic, Gravity, in which Sandra Bullock always seems to find someone to talk to despite being stranded in outer space. In comparing these two films, it's hard not to feel like Gravity takes the easy road, shoving exposition and hamfisted backstory and forced emotional arcs at the audience. Meanwhile, All Is Lost manages to deal with many of the same emotional and spiritual truths in a more concise, ambiguous, and subtle way by having the cajones to follow through on the theme of isolation, and make the main character's voice the tool that he uses least. Of course, All Is Lost does not offer nearly the scope of breathtaking spectacle that Gravity does, so it's a trade-off. Gravity is more exciting and technically masterful, whereas All Is Lost takes the prize for being most grounded (oceaned?) and flawlessly executed.

The other recent survivalist film with a spiritual bent that I can't help but think about is 2012's Life of Pi. That movie also saw its main character stranded in the middle of the ocean, and, similar to Gravity and other recent survival thriller Buried, cheated its premise of isolation through voiceover, frequent cuts to a frame narrative, conversations with God/Allah/Vishnu, and conversations with George Clooney a CGI tiger. Once again, Pi's emotional and spiritual truths feel foisted upon us, whereas the opposite is true in All Is Lost. It can be watched purely for the thrills; all thematic resonance is made entirely through inference. Not to mention that the tension and suspense of an old guy weathering a storm counterintuitively manages to be far more effective than the suspense generated by a young boy on a raft trying not to get eaten by a tiger. This is thanks to the former film's workmanlike attention to detail in all of its aspects. Every move that Our Man makes is clear and essential, without being telegraphed, to the audience. Thus we feel his peril as if we've also done the hard work, but been thwarted by fate at every turn.

I may be making this movie sound like busywork. The reality is that the camerawork and the editing keep it brisk and personal. I subtitled this review "A Silent Monologue," which I should clarify pertains only to the character, as the film is filled with excellent sound editing that was mostly layered on after the fact, but that works like gangbusters to make the scenes feel tangible. The creaks of the boat, constant splashes, and indeterminate seafaring noises make us feel present, not to mention the oppressive wrath of the storms, or the spare but valiant horns of the soundtrack. The camerawork (for which Chandor and cinematographer Frank G. DeMarco adhered to what they called the bungee cord rule, meaning the camera could never be further from Redford than a bungee cord's length), which is nearly as intimate as the inside of an astronaut's helmet during a panic attack, combines with the sound design and Redford's astoundingly subdued performance to make All Is Lost feel both unflinchingly personal and unquestionably universal. This is about one man trying to persevere in a sinking boat. This is about all of humanity trying to persevere in a universe that doesn't always seem to give a good gosh darn. This is about an old man and the sea.

Apparently Robert Redford was bashful when the film screened at the Cannes Film Festival and received nine straight minutes of applause. That's why people go on boats.

4 / 5  BLOBS