Occupying the exact thematic mid-point between “Leave No Trace” and “Children of Men” while never quite attaining the heights of either of those touchpoints, Casey Affleck’s “Light of My Life” is nevertheless, still a solid, somber but superbly performed indie which is both energized and undermined by its real-life context. And that context is, no matter how firm one’s intentions to engage with the film in isolation of its filmmaker, unignorable. Written, directed and performed (often in long, steady monologues) by an actor who won his Oscar the year the #MeToo levee broke, and against whom two women made allegations of sexual harassment in 2010, this is the story of a resourceful, loving man’s protective instinct toward his prepubescent daughter, in a world in which her gender makes her a target because a pandemic has decimated the female population. You’d have to be pretty numerate to count the ways this could go horribly wrong, or to calculate the extreme probability of failure.
But it’s not a failure. Affleck wades into this treacherous morass with reckless sincerity and a depth of feeling that convinces even when the film is at its most self-indulgent. The style of the film, shot in Adam Arkapaw‘s, low-key, naturally lit, clean-lined images and scored to haunting piano-and-cello perfection by Daniel Hart, suggests he was paying close attention to the indie auteurs, such as David Lowery and Kenneth Lonergan, with whom he has worked as an actor. And the script can be read as a surprisingly naked, indeed sometimes over-literal attempt to reckon with modern gender politics: if the Affleck-the-actor’s character gets as much wrong as he does right there is no sense that Affleck-the-writer-director is unaware of those flaws. Less surprising, perhaps is that it is masterfully performed, not just by the undeniably talented Oscar-winner, but by beguiling newcomer Anna Pniowsky, as Rag, the girl-masquerading-as-a-boy, who is just coming to an age where the nomadic existence she and her father have been living for eight years is beginning to chafe.
Following a “female plague” that wipes out almost all the women and girls, including Mom (‘Handmaid’ Elisabeth Moss, surely now the poster girl for womanhood imperilled by society-wide epidemics), Dad and daughter have been living off-grid, making camp in forests, foraging for food and when all else fails, going to town for supplies with Rag dressed as a boy. But the constant paranoia, the friendlessness, and the rootlessness is starting to wear them both down — it’s just that Rag can admit it where her father can’t, his resolve bolstered by occasional flashbacks to the promises he made to his dying wife. Affleck’s screenplay, in true indie fashion, honors intimacy over spectacle and so is not overly concerned with the wider consequences of the pandemic; instead outside characters are almost always a threatening presence and the dynamic between Rag and her watchful father takes center stage, with him as her self-anointed protector, educator, playmate, and parent.
It is too schematic, and can be prescriptive in some of its extended monologues and storytelling interludes. The charming but overlong bedtime story that opens the film, about a girl fox called Goldie and a boy fox called Art, and their encounter with Noah’s ark, is a little too glibly reworked by the precocious Rag, and thereby too obviously sets up a role-reversal twist that would have been much more satisfying had it been less heavily foreshadowed. (Though it is fun that Affleck voices Noah as a “G’Day”-ing Australian, in presumably a sly reference to Russell Crowe).
But as the film builds towards its foreseeable but touching climax, when a brief interlude of companionship and comfort ends abruptly and violently, its meandering course takes in some fascinatingly risky moments. Dad explains the facts of life to Rag, to the cringing embarrassment of both, and at one point they even share an exchange in which he tries, falteringly, to explain the nature of male viciousness to Rag and, whether by accident or design, the phrase “Not all men…” occurs not once but twice. Cue sharp intakes of breath all around.
That might seem like a dog whistle, and for a moment it seems like Affleck might do us all a favor and lapse into something patently self-pitying or overtly self-justifying. After all, Bad Man Makes Bad Film is such a comforting headline and had he done so, we could all have rested a little easier in our certainties, just like we did when Louis C.K. got a way, way-too-soon shot at a “comeback” and then absolutely whiffed it anyway.
But “Light of my Life” is not a bad film, instead it’s a heartfelt, intelligent and earnest one (if a little tidy) that prompts far more questions, about whether we believe in the possibility of rehabilitation, and who deserves that opportunity and who gets to decide, than can be adequately explored in a review. So it will have to suffice to say that even if you have a hard time believing Affleck’s insistence that the script was written long before #MeToo and #TimesUp, the conclusion that “Light of My Life” comes to is difficult to take issue with even in these times of heightened awareness. Though he’s perhaps the wokest Dad on earth, Affleck’s character finally has to face up to the inadequacy of his paternalistic protective instinct and the untenability of his desire to keep his daughter sequestered from a world that might hurt her. All those impulses are more about him than her, and this was never supposed to be the boy-fox’s story at all. [B]