The first thought most will have after a read-through of Shane Carruth’s monstrous, 181-page screenplay for his unproduced film, “The Modern Ocean,” recently posted to Twitter by Carruth himself, is a no-brainer: No wonder Carruth couldn’t secure funding for this sucker. But the follow-up thought most will have after that read-through is also a no-brainer: What a damn shame Carruth inhabits an industry overseen by leagues and leagues of incurious minds with no vision and no sense of adventure.
READ MORE: Shane Carruth Releases ‘The Modern Ocean’ Script & Music Because “It Might Be Fun”
“The Modern Ocean” is by any definition a monstrosity; abiding by the age-old rule for calculating movie run-time based on the script length, the film clocks in at roughly 3 hours, outweighing Steven Zaillian’s script for Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” by 40 or so pages. Grant that “The Irishman” has a 209-minute running time, a reminder that said rule is more of a guideline. But grant also that 181 pages is a damn lot of pages from any screenwriter, and from Carruth, specifically, this counts for what feels like twice as much. Partly that sensation of elasticity—the feeling that each line takes minutes to read and digest all on its own—is a product of Carruth’s detail-oriented style, granular in focus but scrubbed of hard visual construction all the same.
This is not a complaint. This is a compliment. Few contemporary filmmakers approach their craft the way Carruth does, embracing a relaxed economy with his writing and with his direction: He wastes little and uses what’s left to express everything. Elliptical as his first two films, 2006’s “Primer” and 2013’s “Upstream Color,” are to the eye, all that any audience needs to comprehend them is right there in the frame. In exchange, both expect the audience’s undivided attention, and quite arguably multiple viewings, which sounds like a drag except that his movies are such a pleasure to watch even at their most opaque that multiple viewings are really a treat. (“Upstream Color,” one of the absolute best films of its decade, in particular.)
READ MORE: ‘A Topiary’: Shane Carruth Releases His Pitch Trailer For The Unproduced Sci-Fi Epic
These combined qualities present in “The Modern Ocean,” which takes a determinedly blockbuster-leaning sensibility, or what passes as blockbuster-leaning for Carruth, who will likely never be anything other than cerebral but who obviously cares about having a good time; how else to explain this line, dropping about halfway through the script?
“Pyram and Gael enter, have a brief LOVE affair with GUNS”
Pyram, a 14-year-old scrappy self-starter, and Gael Corbusier, scion of the ultra-wealthy Corbusier family, are men on their own separate missions (as well as a shared mission for glory, fame, and fortune, such as they are), but they’re also boys, and so when they peruse the arsenal aboard the vessel they’re working on, the Torc Eleanor, they do what boys do: Play cops ‘n robbers with one another before tossing naval mines overboard for target practice. This is, if only in description, the most lighthearted beat in Carruth’s body of work, pure comedy, unrelated to the deployment of plot and narrative. The scene appears to be there for fun more than purpose, which given Carruth’s natural inclination toward purposeful writing feels surprising and uncomplicated.
But that makes a good argument for why it’s essential. “The Modern Ocean,” as written, is a deeply complex movie. This is in keeping with Carruth’s style as a writer; flashbacks and flashforwards are common throughout the work, measured in minutes, hours, days, nights, and months, cutting back and forth between the befores and the afters as each of his characters schemes and maneuvers toward the fruition of their individual goals, which of course are myriad and unclear.
The overarching ambition driving Pyram, by all indications the closest thing “The Modern Ocean” has to a true protagonist, is the sale and purchase of information: He’s helped devised a method for accurate forecasting of weather, which involves the ocean’s temperature, schools of fish, and leftovers after a feeding frenzy. (Carruth best explains the process through dialogue, as weird as the concept may sound in the abstract.) Gael wants to get to know his magnate father by getting in proximity with Rene, apparently a dock supervisor, employee, and confidant to Gael’s dear old dad. Beth, Gael’s sister, has an insurance fraud plan to carry out. So it goes.
Carruth blends the intrigue with maritime combat, something out of his comfort zone: Action is a nonfactor in “Primer” and “Upstream Color,” much less action shot at sea, so as dense as the back-and-forth between the Torc and rival ships reads, the very idea that Carruth has orchestrated a good old fashioned battle scene on open waves is incredibly exciting. For one thing, watching an intellectual like him kick back and film explosions, refined and restrained as they are, is immediately compelling because this is usually the domain of directors known for pleasing crowds and not cinema with aspirations beyond staging cool set pieces. Imagining how Carruth would pull off these sequences is a great thought exercise.
Scale comes to mind. So does the balance he maintains in terms of high and low tech; the care he takes to articulate how the hidden fish-food treasure buried under the clay at the bottom of the ocean suggests state of the art innovations, and yet people still type on court reporting stenographs. Quite the contrast. Carruth, of course, leans toward the low rather than the high in past work (a la “Primer”), so again, this doesn’t come as much of a shock—and neither does the lack of interest in funding for “The Modern Ocean.”
Hopefully, someone with chutzpah steps up to finance Carruth’s vision. Breaking down the particulars of his work as written does an injustice to the unrealized production he’s put on the page. For now, there’s the script, the original music Carruth composed for the film’s soundtrack, and the would-be cast, including Tom Holland, Chloë Grace Moretz, Daniel Radcliffe, Keanu Reeves, Jeff Goldblum, and Anne Hathaway; Holland is clearly pictured as Pyram, while the rest of the cast is somewhat flexible save for Hathaway, who most likely is there to play Beth. But “picture” is all we can do until a kindly investor or two decide to fund Carruth’s film, and the pleasures of imagination have their limits.
