The tag line is based on an ‘inspiring’ true story. While it’s fascinating, one wouldn’t say there’s anything inspiring about a young woman named Tami (Shailene Woodley) whose found bloodied and disoriented on a yacht with knee-deep water following a storm. What started out in Tahiti as a 4,000 mile gig with boyfriend Richard (Sam Claflin)hired to sail a yacht to San Diego for $10,000, isn’t something one would call ‘inspiring’ either.
Never the less, through awkward scene intercuts we flashback to Tami in Tahiti, jobless, looking for employment to coast along, living on a whim, and whatever adventure the wind blows. Far from inspiring.
From the onset, it’s clear she’s athletic and agile, model-slim and long-limbs. Inspiring enough to make the rest of us contact a personal trainer and then put in a call to Weight Watchers.
Enter Richard. Enter romance and sun-kissed noses and mai tais.
And then comes the boat.
But the boat has been there all along and that’s the problem. We’ve been going back and forth in flashback. Tami hasn’t earned us because we’re not emotionally attached. Organically we don’t fall in love with their journey because we know they’ll crash.
The adorable Woodley has make a career of action and romance (Fault in Our Stars and Divergent series.) Claflin, too, came from Me Before You and TheHunger Games, thus the perfect casting. Their performances are incredibly highly spirited, raw and real as if we, too, taste parched lips, and ship wreck in the middle of the Pacific. But the intercuts don’t quite work until the very end when all is revealed. Meantime, you’ll feel far more adrift than 45 days.
This is a Perfect Storm of a different type because we never feel an urgency as we did for the five fishermen who had to choose between life, and feeding their families. These two are drifters simply adrift…in every sense of the word.