There
is an old man and the sea—sans marlin. There
is no tiger, either. Instead it is an
errant workaday cargo container that leads to a mortal and existential crisis in J.C.
Chandor’s All is Lost (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York.
“Our
Man,” as he is simply billed, is in the midst of a solo cruise through the
Indian Ocean when his small yacht is struck by said container. He wakes the find his boat taking on water
and the electronics, including the radio, shorted out. He is able to patch up the gaping hole and bail
out most of the water, but lasting damage has been done. Sailing blindly as a result, Our Man unknowingly
proceeds towards a Sebastian Junger level storm.
Considering
it arrives so soon after Ang Lee’s Oscar winning Life of Pi, viewers might assume Lost is just more of the same.
However, there is a muscular leanness to Chandor’s film that frankly
compares favorably to its predecessor.
All the New Age allegories and comforting sentimentality are stripped
away, leaving a mere man to face the elements alone.
On
one level, Chandor’s screenplay is relatively simple, with almost no dialogue
to be heard from start to finish. Still,
despite the limits of the water-bound location, Chandor dexterously introduces
one darned thing after another to torment his sole character. Being the one and only face of a film is
always a considerable challenge, but the shockingly haggard looking Robert
Redford (showing his full seventy seven years) rises to the occasion. Rather than acting out and raging against
fate, he vividly portrays the man’s slow deflation, which is far more
compelling over time.
If
not as visually arresting as Pi, Lost fully conveys the cold, damp, claustrophobic
crumminess of Our Man’s precarious situation.
Technically, it is quite an accomplished film, with particularly credit
due to the Tahoe, the Tenacious, and the Orion, the three vessels that sailed their
last as stand-ins for Our Man’s ill-fated Virginia Jean.
