Parents tend to have no perspective about their children, especially their newborn kin. They are the embodiment of life, golden treasures and mothers and fathers can stare at them lovingly all day long without pause. As such, as a love letter to his children and the halcyon days of baby coos and pure unadulterated love, Derek Cianfrance’s “The Light Between Oceans” is a little too precious and too enamored with itself. Not with hubris, mind you. This isn’t the male gaze, it’s the parental one that wants to squeeze the pain away and dote over its characters, their children and the heartaches they encounter. And “The Light Between The Oceans” is Cianfrance’s latest baby and one that he is clearly very devoted to and overly protective of.
Set in 1918, a few months before the end of WWI, the movie centers on Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) who fought valiantly in France, but bears the hollow eyes of a man who has seen too much death. Unmoored, and in search for a spiritual escape from his pain, the ex-soldier takes a position as a light keeper on a remote island known for its sense of despairing isolation.
But Tom soon meets and falls in love with (and marries) the endearing and sweet Isabel Graysmark (Alicia Vikander), the daughter of his boss, and her affections give his adrift existence purpose. Upon settling on Tom’s island of solitude, the couple experience several devastating miscarriages — one wrenchingly shot in a thematically brutal storm — that decimate Isabel emotionally. The couple’s seemingly barren fate — perhaps too conveniently to bear — intervenes on the grief stricken pair when a small boat washes up on their shores, a dead man and a screaming baby inside. Against their better judgement, the couple unofficially adopt the child as if they were called upon to safe harbor the infant. But the consequences of this act of god aren’t far behind. What then unravels is a moral tale of guilt and suffering as Tom and Isabel meet the real mother of their child (Rachel Weisz) and their seemingly honorable facade of doing what’s right for their baby begins to crack like a fractured mirror.
Cianfrance’s narrative is affecting and even at times, devastating, but the plaintive picture — constant in its impressionistic and contemplative tone — often gets swept up in its own fragility. Gorgeously shot by Adam Arkapaw (“Macbeth,” “True Detective,” “Top Of The Lake”) the natural, often low-lit and conversely sun-kissed drama is gorgeous to look at and features a strong first half of charming meet cutes, tentative affections and scenes of sweeping romance and epic natural vistas. But as the atmosphere becomes relentlessly dour, soapy and the plot becomes mired in further melodrama, the butterfly delicateness of the first act becomes brittle to the point of crumbling
Shot often in nearly claustrophobic close-ups on the characters faces, John Cassavetes style, the movie often feels like it has a near-desperate desire to express intimacy, as if pressing your face next to the characters somehow makes for intensity of feeling. The characters exchanged glances, whispers and pained expressions are all too in your face (literally), and much of his movie’s good intentions, the passionate qualities, quickly become overdone, even overwrought.
While the movie features strong, earnest performances from its leads (Fassbender and Vikander), the tenor begins to veer off in the second half where the intimate moments become either saccharine or overly dramatic. Cianfrance essentially miscalculates; in trying to raise stakes, tension and emotion, he overcooks the picture with gobs of forlorn woe. Even the great Alexandre Desplat’s always-wistful score doesn’t work; it simply suggest twinkling melancholy and tragedy too much and too often.
‘Oceans’ isn’t all a wash though. Cianfrance is a terrific director with an affinity for human empathy, heartbreak and loss, but these elements just don’t hold water all the way through. The scope and scale of the picture can be quite grand too; the cinematic qualities of windswept tragedy and sea-pounding anguish are quite powerful at times.
Shot in 2014, Cianfrance was reportedly in the editing room for months trying to shape the picture into a manageable form and it shows — especially in the last act which tips into syrupy territory (the less said about the cornball credits, an unfortunate kiss off, the better). ‘Oceans’ features nearly four protracted endings, many of them treacly, that dilute the emotional resonance of some truly moving scenes. And its conclusions are also redolent of reshoots that veer dangerously close to something out of Nicholas Sparks. It’s as if every alternative ending is included in hopes of reaching an emotional climax that never really arrives. There’s something strangely impersonal about it too despite all the affection; it reads like adaptation and not quite from the heart which maybe explains all the forced emotions.
At its best and most ravishing moments, “The Light Between Oceans” resembles the sensual beauty of Jane Campion drama “The Piano.” And while intimate initially, the movie doesn’t possess the same type of masterful control. Ironically, like the broken piano in the film, that’s eventually mended, ‘Oceans’ biggest problem is that it is essentially played only in one minor key the entire time and its one long grace note that the story can’t sustain.
A lovely, but uneven moral tale of love, forgiveness and heartrending misdeeds, Derek Cianfrance’s “The Light Between Oceans” is conceptually sound, and at times, beautifully gut-wrenching. But the doleful picture often becomes engrossed in conveying at all times just how precious life and love is. Derek Cianfrance cares so much about “The Light Between The Oceans,” but perhaps he fawns over all the particulars just a little too much. The filmmaker never squeezes the life out of his picture per se, but like a hug that overstays its welcome, its embrace is perhaps a little too close and tight for comfort. [C+]