BEFORE: Perhaps this film rightfully belongs in the romance chain in February, but then I won't really know that for sure unless I watch it, either here or there. The problem is that it doesn't link to other romances on my list, it links to films like the new "Tomb Raider" reboot, or that new "Mortal Engines" film that looks really stupid. So I'm putting it here, with Bryan Brown carrying over from "Peter Rabbit", because it will allow me to get back to Domhnall Gleeson in a couple days, and back to Rose Byrne a couple days after that.
THE PLOT: A lighthouse keeper and his wife living off the coast of Western Australia raise a baby they rescue from a drifting rowboat.
AFTER: While there is romance in this film, it's more like one of those "moral dilemma" sort of deals - since this is based on a book, it seems like a novelist went out of his way to make a really tricky conundrum where morals are concerned. What felt like the "right thing" to do was not what this couple did, or perhaps they felt they were doing the "right thing" but other people didn't see it that way from afar. They did what made them feel happy and made a baby feel loved, but over the long haul it's tough to say if they were doing right by that child, or just thinking of themselves.
Let's back up a bit, because I'm back to post-World War I times tonight, a time also seen recently in "Goodbye Christopher Robin". A man returns to Australia after fighting in the Great War, the war to end all wars, only it wasn't, and he's also got some form of PTSD, because he's willing to take a job in a remote lighthouse, either to clear his head in solitude or because he doesn't feel fit to be around society, and the further he can get from the war, the better. He's not even deterred by the fact that the last man to hold that position went stir crazy, started having visions of his dead wife using the lighthouse to signal ships, or something.
Of course he meets a lovely lass, just before going out to the lighthouse, so of course he's going to be thinking about her during his time alone, and by writing to her, they develop a friendship that turns into something more. Of course she awakens the parts of him that he thought were dead inside, this seems like it's checking off all the boxes in one of those Harlequin romance novels - that's a secret fantasy of a woman, right? That only she could break down the barriers of a toughened veteran who's closed himself off, and with her patience and love, bring him back to the light? That's the theory, anyway.
But the truth is that she's not prepared to live in isolation, on a remote island - he had the war to prepare him for this, because living apart from society and maintaining the lighthouse probably seems like a paradise compared to the frozen trenches of the Western Front in war-torn Europe. But hey, at least they've got each other, and things seem to be going fairly OK until they try to have a child, and their efforts are unsuccessful. Then fate/coincidence/screenwriting brings them a rowboat containing a dead man and a live baby, which he feels obligated to report, but she considers the consequences of not doing that, pretending she gave birth successfully, because who would know enough to say otherwise?
It's only through another turn of fate/coincidence/screenwriting that the lighthouse keeper manages to figure out the baby's real name, and how she came to be in that rowboat. Here's where things seem quite strained to me, because there are how many cities along the coast of Western Australia, and so really, what are the odds? Agreed, I'm not an expert on prevailing currents or tides or how an unmanned boat can get from here to there, so I can't really call B.S. here, but it kind of smells like it. Anyway, it's the kind of thing that couldn't happen in modern times because of things like DNA testing, but people still understood the genetics of things like hair and eye color, right? Or did that come along later, too? Like if you had two parents with blue eyes, and you knew that blue was on a recessive gene, it would be impossible for those parents to produce a child with brown eyes, because neither had the dominant gene for that. But the opposite would be possible, if both parents had brown eyes but carried the recessive blue eye color gene, then they could have a child with blue eyes, if she were genetically double-recessive. See, I still remember what I learned in 10th grade biology class.
But this is really a film about guilt, not love. Survivor's guilt for making it through the war alive, the guilt of not doing the right thing, the guilt of raising someone else's baby without consent, then the guilt of letting someone else take the punishment for your sins. Plenty of guilt to go around here, it's only much later in the story that anyone learns any sense of forgiveness. It's great that they finally get there, but it just feels like it's too little, too late because of everyone's hang-ups.
Also starring Michael Fassbender (last seen in "Assassin's Creed") Alicia Vikander (last seen in "Jason Bourne"), Rachel Weisz (last seen in "Envy"), Jack Thompson (last seen in "Australia"), Caren Pistorius, Florence Clery, Georgie Jean Gascoigne, Anthony Hayes (last seen in "War Machine"), Benedict Hardie (ditto), Emily Barclay, Leon Ford, Thomas Unger, Jane Menelaus, Garry McDonald (last seen in "The Kids Are Alright"), Marshall Napier.
RATING: 5 out of 10 reward notices
No comments:
Post a Comment