64 San Diego Reader September 1, 2016
A kid of their own L
ight is hardly the word to describe the melodramatic slog that awaits viewers in
writer-director Derek Cianfrance’s The Light Between Oceans. After a tour of killing Jerrys
in the Great War, bachelor Tom (Oscar®-nominee Michael Fass- bender) returns to Australia, where he plans on settling down as a light- house keeper. Bachelorette #1 Isabel (Oscar®-winner Alicia Vikander) is the town looker, making her, in accordance with Hollywood’s rule of keeping up surface appearances, the girl in the picture. In this year’s clumsiest apportioning of verbal foreshadowing, Isabel introduces childhood mortality on their first date. Tom doesn’t think twice when Isabel asks for his hand. Those who witnessed Cian-
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of miscarriages, Isabel decides that fate has destined her to play mother to the little girl who, along with her dead father, washes up on shore in a rowboat. This is Cianfrance’s one chance to lighten the load, to unleash a little visual magic to boost the narrative contrivance, and all he can summon are handheld shots of crashing foam. Tom suggests reporting their findings to the police and then waiting a few months before legally
france’s debut feature, Blue Valentine, know how much he enjoys making his characters (and audiences) suffer. Not surprisingly, the steady torrents of anguish (and all that artificial light designed to bleach out the suffocat- ing interior closeups) make these oceans difficult to access. After a pair
adopting the child, a notion Isabel quickly poo-poos. Don’t you hate it when a character holds onto an object — in this case, a baby’s rattle that Tom discovers when burying the girl’s father — for no other reason than a nonimaginational author who couldn’t devise a less convenient way to build narrative conflict? Enter baby mama Hannah
(Oscar®-winner, Rachel Weisz), who, along with the help of the aforemen- tioned plaything, quickly gets hip to the couple’s game. Isabel is such an irrational, unlikeable cur that at any minute, one expects Hannah to scream, “The dingbat stole my baby!”
A dingbat stole my baby: Alicia Vikander and Florence Clery in The Light Between Oceans. For a couple who fell in love dur-
ing the making of the picture, pre- cious little of Fassbender and Vikan- der’s off-screen scintillation finds its way to the multiplex. Void of depth and shading, they’re designed sim- ply to push the tired plot from point to point. One is more likely to find
character backstory in an introduc- tory segment on TV’s The Bachelor. Those hankering for the blush of
real-life romance to make the leap onto celluloid would be better off watching Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in Heaven Can Wait or Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis in The Fly. And if you’re looking for a film about a deranged parent so desper- ate to possess a kid of their own that they’d resort to kidnapping (and worse), buy a ticket to Don’t Breathe. — Scott Marks
Disorder — While waiting to see if the French army deems him fit to return to active duty in Afghanistan, PTSD- riddled soldier Vincent (Matthias Schoenaerts) accepts a routine side gig guarding the wife (Diane Kruger) and son of a shady Lebanese business- man. With more psychotropic drugs in his system than you can find on a Walgreen’s pharmacy shelf, Vincent can barely focus on getting through the day. Still, the second he’s on the clock, nothing gets past his gaze. Nothing, that is, until a tight first half gives way to easy romance capped by a wobbly climax. (Sorta like what happened in Drive.) Why the bad guys are hired to harass Kruger is never made clear. Unless you buy into the cockeyed end- ing, Vincent’s sudden rise as head of the household also goes unjustified. Worth seeing for Schoenaerts’s dead- eyed (and dead-on) performance and director Alice Winocour and audio designer Nicolas Becker’s sound rep- resentation of Vincent’s trauma. — Scott Marks
Complete Unknown — Have you ever wondered how it feels to be on your own? With no direction home? Like a complete unknown? Like a rolling stone? Well, you won’t get much sat- isfaction here, because even though titular mystery woman Alice (Rachel Weisz, stifled) is blessed with the (frankly implausible) ability to slip through life as any number of people, it turns out she exists mainly to help old flame Tom (Michael Shannon, ir- ritable) get some perspective on life. Director and co-writer Joshua Mar- ston likes to let his scenes run long; occasionally, this proves engaging (a dinner party that goes from gregari- ous to curious to awkward to unpleas- ant), but more often (an extended frog montage), it just proves long. It might’ve worked if Tom’s midlife crisis had been more of a crisis, and if we’d gotten more insight into both Alice’s experience and technique. Instead, we get only pique and peeks. — Matthew Lickona
Morgan — It’s a fascinating enough setup: stony-faced corporate risk-man- agement consultant Lee (Kate Mara) travels to a rural scientific outpost to investigate an incident: it seems the project’s comparatively emotive arti- ficial intelligence (Anya Taylor-Joy) has gone and poked out someone’s eye. There is talk of terminating the product, emotions and all. (Nobody wants another disaster like the one at Helsinki.) And the opening act is solid and tense: Lee spends her first day as- sessing the team, a varied bunch with varying attitudes toward their creation. Behaviorist Amy (Rose Leslie) gets the
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