Ed. Note: The release date of this film has been pushed back to November 1
What does it say about the cultural zeitgeist that this Fall we get not one, but two films about individuals floating out in an unfathomable abyss, struggling for survival in a cruel, unforgiving cosmos? Gravity was enough, a spectacular visual fugue that employed virtuosic filmmaking to frame a sentimental story of administrative perseverance. Now we get All is Lost, J.C. Chandor’s film about a man who wakes up in his yacht to find that he has run adrift of a shipping container that has born a hole in his hull. Water rushes in, his navigation equipment is busted, and the implication is clear: it’s not just the cosmos that is out to get us, but the global economic system of rampant consumption that has spoiled this retiree’s attempts at finding Walden-bliss on the Indian Ocean.
All Is Lost is a cramped, methodic film, and like Gravity, it is as much about process as it is about existential substance. The unnamed man is Robert Redford, unnamed because we never encounter anyone else in the film to give him one. Thus the film naturally takes on epically allegorical overtones, reminiscent of The Old Man in the Sea. Unnamed men are easily substituted for universals, and here is we encounter “the we,” struggling against a succession of misfortunes, holding onto life because the instincts borne of life demands holding onto. After Redford patches the hole, a nasty storm blows in. The yacht is tipped and tumbled through the waves. The mast is broken, eventually Redford must abandon ship. He digs out some off-the-grid navigational equipment and teaches himself enough to know that he’s in a bad spot, floating out in nowhere. The only hope is a shipping lane, which he drifts into and out of.
What’s most impressive about All is Lost is its wordless plot and Redford, who, working with very little indeed, manages to hold us tight to most of his ordeal. The 77-year-old movie star uses his body magnificently. He is not frail or weak, but he is old and outmatched. Tiny actions, like trying to hook up a busted radio to car battery, become epic undertakings. The tension of the film is bound up in things like Redford’s fatiguing biceps, which, when tense, look like cables that could break at any moment. Chandler, who wrote the script and directed the film, deserves credit for the movie’s clear construction, a slow-drone escalating mess that is effectively anxious throughout.
But like Gravity, All is Lost’s musing on the edge of the existential abyss falls short when pushed for content or implication. What are these films ultimately saying about reality besides merely shining a light on a kind of nobility intrinsic in the instinct to survive? We root for life, we hold tight to these characters and hope they find their way out. But unlike last year’s sea-float-film, Life of Pi, there’s isn’t even an attempt in All is Lost to suggest that one’s desperate drive to hold onto life is related to our consciousness’s uneasy grasp of it. There is no tiger on the boat, no marlin on the line, no sublimity in the face of death. Only a man on a boat watching an indifferent, natural world churn. Nothing to do but wait for the lifeline.
