It’s become a common thing in Hollywood…characters from a film falling in love on the set in real life. Brad and Angelina in Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Decades ago there was Annette Benning and Warren Beatty in Bugsy. There’s been quite a few in between. But for many of these actors and especially for our audience, we can actually see and feel the moment chemistry erupts.
In this, Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander apparently fell in love while living in a remote lighthouse in New Zealand for the making of this movie. Yet, the chemistry is hard to determine since she seems more his daughter, than his age-appropriate wife.
In the story, based on the novel by M. L. Stedman, it’s December 1918, and Fassbender portrays Tom Sherbourne, a former soldier returning from WWI. He’s turned lighthouse keeper. Clearly the job features zero paradise on the island, his isolation mistaken for a sort of Virginia Woolf…
Nevertheless, he falls in love with Isabelle (Vikander) who is wonderfully vivacious and radiant. He tells her the lighthouse offers prosperity and hope. The two marry and she gets pregnant, followed by a couple of miscarriages. But, as luck would have it, a dingy appears – seemingly out of nowhere – and washes ashore with a baby inside. Of course alerting the authorities is never an option. Adoption is the only cure.
Eventually the baby’s real life mother (Rachel Weisz) surfaces. At this point, it’s impossible for us to watch her suffer, knowing that ‘they’ (Isabelle and Tom) have her baby.
In the movie Sabrina, Julia Ormond once said “there’s a job” before questioning, ‘what kind of a man lives in a lighthouse?’ The answer was probably intended to be a man with a tortured soul trying to do the right thing all around.
The premise surprisingly gets us thinking… If a spouse loses a partner they’re called a ‘widow’ but if a parent loses a child, they’re still called a parent. And who better to serve the child’s needs? The only woman she’s called “mommy” or her biological one?
Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines) directs with a controlled hand, his actors all delivering perfect performances. Even the soundtrack, moody and melancholy, by Oscar-winning, Alexandre Desplat, hits the single piano key before erupting into his seductive unleashing of a storm. But in the end, even his methodic repetition just doesn’t work. The character of Vikander leaves us little to sympathize for and instead a lot to question. ..
Why didn’t she continue to try to have her own babies? How couldn’t she get pregnant (miles from birth control and stuck on an island?) How is it a woman who declares maternal elements would throw such a crying fit when releasing her would-be child to its real mother? Wouldn’t she opt to stay calm so that the baby’s last image of her ‘mother’ would be a gentle one?
In the Bible’s King Solomon, the ‘good’ mother won’t cut the baby in half. She lets it go. Vikander’s character grows increasingly selfish and delusional, leaving our sympathy to ebb and flow with the tides. When it comes to the ocean, while anything is possible, true love is letting go…
t’s not often we get to cry at a movie and we should have with this, but instead we cry for what is a very laborious film on a very Laborious holiday.